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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS 
IDEALS 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS 
IDEALS 



BY 

ARTEMAS JEAN HAYNES, M.A. 

MINISTER OF THE UNITED CHURCH ON THE GREEN, 
NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
NEW YORK::::::::::::::::::::: I 907 



UBRARY of CONGRESS I 
Two Cooles Received 
MAY 31 190f 

\ Copyright E*try 
CLASSf Jt KXc„ No. 
COPY B. 






Copyright, 1907, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published, May, 1907 



TROW DIRECTORY 

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



DEDICATED TO THE 

Rev. THEODORE T. MUNGER, D.D. 

OF WHOSE LOYAL FRIENDSHIP I CANNOT 
SPEAK TOO GRATEFULLY 



PREFACE 

At the present time many thoughtful people are 
seriously perplexed by questions that seem to throw 
doubt upon the essentials of the Christian faith. 
That radical and far-reaching changes are taking 
place in our theological conceptions cannot be de- 
nied. What will be the outcome of these changes? 
How much is left of the old faith ? Is there grow- 
ing up a new faith that will meet the religious 
and social needs of a new age ? The answers of 
traditional theology to these questions will not, 
it is becoming clear, satisfy earnest seekers of the 
truth. 

This little volume is sent out in the hope that 
those who are perplexed may find guidance in its 
pages. The writer does not assume that he has 
answered all their questions, but he ventures to hope 
that he may direct their steps into some new way 
of inquiry. The essays are written from the point 
of view of one who frankly accepts the estab- 

vii 



PREFACE 



lished facts of modern science and the new Biblical 
criticism, of one who is in full sympathy with that 
movement of religious life which is finding its inter- 
pretation in what is known as the New Theology. 
This theology, approved by the reasoning intellect, 
has yet to justify itself to the spirit of man. The 
writer's appeal, therefore, is not primarily to dogma 
but to life itself. 

The significance of the general title will appear 
from an examination of the Contents. The en- 
deavor has been made to establish a just balance 
between personal and social values. The writer 
believes in applying the principles of Jesus' teach- 
ing to questions of social, no less than of individual, 
righteousness. Indeed, the two cannot well be 
separated. In every department of human activity 
we are ceasing to regard man as capable of iso- 
lation. 

It will readily be seen that no formal connec- 
tion exists among the various essays. Each is the 
outgrowth of a particular mood ; fragmentary, to be 
sure, but for that very reason adapted to the need 
of busy men and women. Though the book is not 
sent forth in any spirit of over-confidence, yet the 
writer is encouraged by the thought that as these 

viii 



PREFACE 



reflections have been the outgrowth of his own 
real need, others may find them of help in their 
progress toward the ideal. 



United Church on the Green, 
New Haven, Conn., April 26, 1907. 



IX 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

LOVE RAISED TO ITS HIGHEST POWER 3 

THE BEST THINGS 3 

THE PRESENT-DAY PROTEST AGAINST CREEDS ... 3 

THE MORNING HOURS OF LIFE 4 

THE CHILD AND HIS EDUCATION 4 

THE NEW JERUSALEM 5 

THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 5 

THE MINISTRY OF MISFORTUNE 5 

THE EAGER QUEST FOR TRUTH 6 

THE CURSE OF THE CHURCH . 6 

THE ONE SURE ARGUMENT 7 

A GREAT LOVE AND MUCH SERVICE 7 

RELIGION — ITS LOWER AND HIGHER MEANINGS ... 8 

VISION OF POET AND SCIENTIST 8 

OUR FATHER 9 

YOUTH AND OLD AGE 9 

YOUR NEED AND MINE IO 

JESUS OF NAZARETH A SOLID HISTORICAL FACT . . . IO 

THE WILL TO DO . . . I Z 

" GLORIA IN EXCELSIS" 12 

THE GOSPEL OF TO-MORROW 12 

NEW TRUTH OUT OF THE OLD 1 3 

THE PEOPLE MOST ALIVE 13 

THE MAKING OF MANHOOD 14 

THE SECRET OF SPIRITUAL BLESSING 1 5 

SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE LIFE . - . . . . . 15 

EVERY MAN HIS OWN MEDIATOR 1 6 

xi 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

"TO THE UNKNOWN god" 17 

WHY MEN DENY THE TEACHINGS OF FAITH . . . . 1 7 

REPENTANCE CANNOT UNRAVEL THE PAST . . . . 1 8 

THE STAR THAT LEADS TO CHRIST 1 8 

THE CALL TO AN ADVENTUROUS LIFE 19 

HEALTH OF SOUL 20 

THE SEASON OF VISIONS 20 

LOVE AND SPIRITUAL DARING 21 

THE HIDDEN MAN . 22 

SOMETHING NOT TO BE DENIED 2 2 

HOURS THAT WE REMEMBER 23 

THE CHIEF WORK OF THE CHURCH 23 

WHAT KEEPS THE WORLD SWEET 24 

ALL THE WORLD LOVES A LOVER 25 

HEARING AND DOING THE WORD 25 

THE WINE OF THE SOUL 26 

EMMANUEL GOD WITH US 27 

THE TOUCH OF THE HAND 27 

INDIVIDUAL IMMORTALITY 28 

NECESSITY OF ORGANIZATION 29 

THE MISFORTUNE OF BEING FORTUNATE . . . . 29 

OUR GROWTH INTO CHILDHOOD 30 

THE NATIONAL AWAKENING 3 1 

HOW ARTISTS MISINTERPRET THE BIBLE . . . . 3 1 

THE TRUE TEST OF DISCIPLESHIP 32 

A PARABLE OF THE SEED 33 

THE HOUR THAT NOW IS 34 

EVERY CITIZEN SHOULD KNOW HIS OWN CITY . . . 34 

THE GREAT THOUGHT OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY . 35 

PREACHING THE TERRORS OF THE LORD . . . . 36 

THINGS IN CITY LIFE TO WEEP OVER 36 

THE NEED OF A GREAT CAUSE 37 

ONLY ONE RELIGION 38 

TWO KINDS OF MATERIALISM 38 



Xll 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

THE GOLDEN DAY AT HAND 39 

HOW GOD ANSWERS PRAYER 40 

A WORLD-SHAKING ADVENTURE 4 1 

WHO ARE THE "GOOD PEOPLE"? 41 

THE UNNATURALNESS OF "NATURAL DEPRAVITY " . . 42 

THROUGH MAN TO GOD 43 

CONCERNING TRIVIAL EXPERIENCES 44 

WHAT THIS AGE MOST VALUES 44 

OUT OF THE SOUL'S DEPTH 45 

ART AND RELIGION 46 

THE TRUTH OF ALL TRUTHS 47 

THINGS WHICH ABIDE 47 

WHAT SHALL WE DO? 48 

DIVINE DISCONTENT 49 

WHAT SCIENCE HAS DONE AND FAILED TO DO . . 50 

RELATIONSHIP AND RESPONSIBILITY 5 1 

THE CHRIST CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE FATHER . . . 51 

THE CHRISTIAN THEORY OF WEALTH 52 

THE ONLY ROAD TO THE IDEAL 53 

CHRISTIANITY A RELIGION OF HOPE 54 

THE SAVING POWER OF OLD ASSOCIATIONS . . . . 55 

A REALITY OF THE CHILD-HEART 55 

MEN SENT FROM GOD . 56 

THE GREATEST QUESTION IN THE WORLD . . . . 57 

RESPONSIBILITY OF THE SCHOLAR 58 

THE PERFECTIBILITY OF MAN 59 

A QUESTION BENEATH A QUESTION 60 

NATURE TO BE INTERPRETED BY THE GOSPEL ... 60 

SINS OF THE DISPOSITION 6 1 

WHAT CONSTITUTES A GREAT TEACHER? . . . . 62 

WHEREIN LIES THE FAILURE? 63 

DIVINE LOVE AND HUMAN 64 

FREEDOM IN THE MIND ALONE 65 

AN ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 65 



Xlll 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

FRIENDSHIP AND WORLDLY SUCCESS 66 

THE NEW PATRIOTISM 67 

THE INDWELLING GOD 68 

CONVENTIONAL CHRISTIANITY WORLDLY AND UNSPIRITUAL . 69 

A NEW REVERENCE 70 

A WHOLESOME SENSE OF DIVINE JUSTICE . . . . 71 

THE STAR-ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 72 

SORROW WITH THE UPWARD LOOK 73 

A SPIRITUAL SPECTROSCOPE 74 

THE APPEAL OF THE UNKNOWN 75 

DISTINCTION BETWEEN FAITH AND BELIEF . . . . 76 

THE MODERN CITY A SAD SIGHT 77 

IN THE DAYS THAT WERE 78 

AN INEXORABLE LAW 78 

THE WORLD A TEMPLE OF WORSHIP 79 

KINDNESS 80 

THE SPRINGTIDE OF THE SOUL 8 1 

REALITIES THAT LIE TOO DEEP FOR WORDS . . . . 82 

THE LAND OF WARMTH AND LIGHT 83 

INDIGNATION WITHOUT LOVE 84 

OUR LOVE FOR THE WORLD 85 

HEROES OF YESTERDAY 86 

AS TO BELIEF IN DEMONS 86 

OVER AGAINST HIS OWN HOUSE 88 

THE REVIVAL NEEDED TO-DAY 89 

SHALL WE CONTINUE TO USE THE WORD GOD? 90 

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE BIBLE 9 1 

ETERNAL LIFE A PRESENT REALITY 92 

WHY THE PRIESTS HATED JESUS 93 

SELF-INTEREST OR BENEVOLENCE? 95 

A RETURN TO PURITANISM 96 

THE SOUL'S CRUCIBLE 97 

A LESSON UNLEARNED 98 

WHAT ALL MEN DESIRE 99 



XIV 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

BACK TO THE CROSS IOO 

A WISE AND AN UNWISE AGNOSTICISM IOI 

WE TOO WOULD HAVE LOVED HIM 102 

SINGLENESS OF PURPOSE 103 

HOW MEN BECAME CHRISTIANS IN JESUS' TIME . . 1 04 

AS TO SAVING OUR OWN SOULS 1 05 

THE MORAL LIFE FOR ITS OWN SAKE 106 

IF JESUS WERE HERE 107 

THE SHAME OF THE CHURCH 1 08 

BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY 109 

LIFE HAS A MEANING IIO 

PRIVATE PROPERTY A TEUST Ill 

WERE I TO WRITE A CREED 112 

THE HIGH USES OF ADVERSITY 113 

JESUS AND THE GREEK IDEALS 115 

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND THE NEW THOUGHT . . . Il6 

THE SUFFERING GOD 117 

A NEW YEAR CREED Il8 

FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF I IQ 

THE STRUGGLE FOR OTHER LIVES 121 

RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE WAR OF THE CLASSES . . . 122 

THE TRUE CROSS NOT MADE OF WOOD 1 23 

IMMUNITY FROM EVIL 125 

THE REVIVAL OF THE PAST 1 26 

JESUS AS A LAYMAN 127 

THE DIVINE FIRE 129 

EVERY AGE HAS ITS NEW THEOLOGY 130 

THE SECRET OF FAITH I3I 

SAVING OR SERVING MEN WHICH? 132 

LET US LEARN TO HAVE PITY I34 

THE MODERN VIEW OF PUNISHMENT FOR SIN . . . I35 

THE VICTORY OF DEFEAT I36 

A BOOK FOR TWO WORLDS 1 38 

THE FAITH OF THE FUTURE 139 

XV 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 
OBEDIENCE, THE FIRST STEP IN THE CHRISTIAN LIFE . 141 

THE TRUE ATTITUDE TOWARDS PRESENT-DAY REFORM MOVE- 



MENTS 



142 



ARE OUR SUNDAY LAWS RELIGIOUS OR SECULAR?. . .143 

THE REVELATION WITHIN THE MANTLE 1 44 

SYLLOGISM AND STAR 145 

HEART, HEAD, AND HAND 147 

THE UNSEEN BATTLEFIELD 1 48 

SPIRITUAL RELIGION 1 49 

WE ENTER LIFE THROUGH LIVES 1 50 

THE TRUE APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION 152 

HOW GOD MAY BE KNOWN 153 

HOW MUCH IT COSTS TO LOVE 1 55 

MEN WHO BUY AND SELL CHRIST 1 56 

THE DESIRE TO LIVE AFTER DEATH 1 58 

THE HISTORY OF THE RACE A DRAMA 1 59 

IS GOD OMNIPOTENT? l6l 

A STARTLING AND REVOLUTIONARY MESSAGE . . . 1 63 

THE GHOSTS OF PAST SINS 1 64 

THE DIVINITY OF MAN 166 



XVI 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS 
IDEALS 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS 
IDEALS 

Love Raised to Its Highest Power 

Men say that Christianity is love; but love was 
in the world from the very beginning, from the 
moment that eyes first looked into eyes. Chris- 
tianity is something far more; it is love raised to its 
highest power; it is love as Jesus loved. 

The Best Things 

There are some things in life better than power 
or fame, some things better than large wealth; they 
are such old-fashioned things as heart-loyalties, devo- 
tion to a great cause, faithfulness to those with whom 
we are bound up in all the intricate associations of 
friendship and love. 

The Present-Day Protest Against Creeds 

All thoughtful and earnest people deplore the 
present-day protest against creeds. Clear concep- 

3 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

tions of theological truth are hardly less important 
in the perfecting of character than fine impulses of 
religious emotion. Both grace and truth came by 
Jesus Christ. 

The Morning Hours of Life 

The secret of power is in keeping oneself young. 
The secret of our influence over others lies in our 
ability to touch their hearts, to take them out of 
the dullness and routine of daily toil and away from 
the weariness that comes from constant strife, to 
take them back to the morning hours of life, to 
awaken within them the spirit of childhood, to un- 
fold the beauty in old and simple things. 

The Child and His Education 

We have still to learn that all civilization exists 
for the child and that the only really great work 
in this world is his education, the leading out to 
full maturity of all his powers. Jesus saw, with a 
vision encompassing all life, that we are here in the 
world to be educated, that this earth is God's school- 
house, and this life a training for some higher life 
of future usefulness. 

4 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 
The New Jerusalem 

Of the Emperor Augustus it was said, He found 
Rome brick and left it marble. I believe that the 
spirit of the living Christ is working out in every 
city a far greater transformation than that. The 
New Jerusalem which the seer saw in a vision was 
indeed coming down out of heaven, but it was 
coming down to earth. We enter into that New 
Jerusalem by deepening and strengthening and 
purifying the life of our own city. 

The Kingdom of Heaven 

Though it may be somewhat difficult to deter- 
mine how the Jews interpreted the phrase, King- 
dom of heaven, the meaning Jesus attached to it is 
fairly clear. Sometimes it meant to him a power 
in the soul, sometimes a leaven at work in the w^orld, 
sometimes a society redeemed and purified; but al- 
ways to him it was the reign of God — over all, and 
in all, and through all. 

The Ministry of Misfortune 

It seems strange that misfortunes, instead of em- 
bittering, tend to sweeten the soul and touch the 

5 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

spirit to tenderness. One would think it would be 
the other way; that he whom Providence pros- 
pered would be sympathetic towards those less for- 
tunate than himself. But it is rarely so: it is the 
tendency of prosperity to breed selfishness, and of 
misfortune to quicken sympathy. He who experi- 
ences in his own soul the tragedy and sorrow of life 
cannot be unkind. 

The Eager Quest for Truth 

When I speak of the eager quest for truth, I do 
not mean the academic ideal, what has been called 
" the passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence." 
I mean truth as it opens down into the throbbing 
breast of life. I mean truth that is all quivering 
and alive with human interest. I mean what 
Emerson meant when he said, " Let there be an en- 
trance opened for me into realities; I have worn a 
fool's cap too long." 

The Curse of the Church 

The curse of the church to-day is its profession- 
alism. As forms, and pride, and show of wealth 
come in, the old, warm, tender interests go out. 

6 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

How much it would mean if in sincerity we could 
write over the entrance to every church, " I have 
not called you servants, I have called you friends." 
For ourselves, though we carve not the inscription 
over the entrance of the church, we may carve it 
upon our hearts. Thus shall we realize the true 
religion, which is the religion of friendship. 

The One Sure Argument 

We may be as sure of God as w T e are sure of our- 
selves. The new 1 " science, together with the new 
theology, may take aw T ay certain primitive concep- 
tions of God, but nothing can take away the sure 
evidences that spring up within the soul. All the 
scholastic arguments for God may go — I think in- 
deed most of them have gone, — but the argument 
that shapes itself out of a man's personal sense of the 
divine power which orders his life, this argument 
remains and will remain. 

A Great Love and Much Service 

If we would attain happiness, we must first at- 
tain helpfulness. I have read somewhere this defini- 
tion of happiness: " Happiness is a great love and 
much service/ ' Not love alone, for that may be 

7 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

a sentiment as intangible as the mist that fades be- 
fore the morning breeze. Not service alone, for that 
may be sheer drudgery. Happiness springs from 
these two things put together — " a great love and 
much service/ ' Whoever wrote that sentence, con- 
sciously or unconsciously cast into a single utterance 
the whole gospel of Christ. 

Religion — Its Lower and Higher 
Meanings 

Religion is a plant rooted deep in the common 
soil, but it draws its nourishment from the unseen 
resources of the atmosphere above. Religion means 
the use of one's hands in ministries of healing and 
helpfulness; it also means the lifting up of those 
hands in prayer. It means that the green earth is 
firm beneath us ; it means also that somewhere, above 
us, or around us, or within us, there is another 
world, and that other world the reality of which all 
we see here is but the passing shadow. 

Vision of Poet and Scientist 

It was something more than a poet's fancy that 
led Tennyson to speak of love as the " root of crea- 
tion." The vision of the poet is deeper than the 

8 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

sight of the scientist. The latter has observed the 
cruelty in nature, and overstated it; the poet has 
met the cruelty, the terribly selfish struggle for life, 
but he has insight for the great significance of strug- 
gle for the lives of others; he believes that God is 
in it all, and the purpose some far-away, divine pur- 
pose of love. 

Our Father 

If we may trust the holiest life ever lived on earth, 
if we may believe that Jesus built his teaching and 
his character on truth and not falsehood, then we 
may take into our own bosoms this most precious of 
all doctrines, the eternal Fatherhood of God. If 
you ask me to prove it, I cannot ; all I can do is to 
accept it on the authority of my own faith in Christ. 
My Father and your Father ! because he is " the 
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." 

Youth and Old Age 

Would it not be far better if the men who are 
growing old would take life more leisurely, and 
those who are young would take it more strenuously ; 
it would give the younger men a chance and relieve 
the older men of their burdens. Youth is the season 

9 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

of growth, and age the season of ripening. There is 
something tragic in the spectacle of a young man 
wasting his time in frivolous pleasures, and there 
is something pathetic in an old man's holding himself 
with desperate persistence to daily toil. The happy 
balancing of extremes is in that line of Goldsmith's, 
" A youth of labor with an age of ease." 

Your Need and Mine 

The tragedy and pathos of human life lie not in 
its toil, its suffering, its sorrow, its death, but in 
the fact that men and women so commonly fail to 
realize that God is in it all. Your need and mine 
is not to be relieved from the strain at the oar, but 
to have awakened in us a deeper faith that there is 
a divine meaning in the smiting of wind and wave. 
Take out of human life the confidence that God 
sees us, even though we fail to see him; that since 
he is watching over us we need have no fear; take 
that confidence out of life, and you have taken out 
of it all strength and all beauty and all hope. 

Jesus of Nazareth a Solid Historical Fact 

After making all the allowances that a reasonable 
New Testament criticism would claim, Jesus of Naz- 

IO 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

areth stands forth as a solid historical fact. The 
spiritual ideal of Jesus which men have formulated 
is not an unsubstantial dream; it is justified by the 
actual facts of his life as they have shaped themselves 
to critical scholarship. In the gospels we have Jesus 
represented as " the image of the invisible God " ; we 
have the authentic record of an ethical consciousness 
which far surpasses that of any other man known 
to history. 

The Will to Do 

When we see men and women who appear to be 
suffering defeat in life's battle, let us not be too 
hasty in calling their lives failures. Perhaps they 
are achieving an inward and spiritual victory, — at- 
taining unto character, winning the mastery over 
themselves by means of those very adversities which 
seem to be their undoing. Why do we go on in 
life persistently estimating people according to the 
sum of things they accomplish, and remain stone 
blind to the ethical fact underlying that oft-quoted 
line : 

: 'Tis not what man does which exalts him, but 
what man would do." 

II 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 
"Gloria in Excelsis" 

It is not sufficiently recognized that the birth of 
Christianity was the proclamation of a great joy. 
When the angel choir sang " Gloria in Excelsis/' it 
was a song of joy such as had never before burst 
upon the world. " Behold, I bring you good tidings 
of great joy, which shall be to all people." It was 
a song of joy that ushered Christ into the world, and 
it was with a message of joy that he left it. " These 
things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might 
remain in you, and that your joy might be full." 



The Gospel of To-morrow 

The last century gave itself up very largely to 
speculation upon the nature of the Christian gospel. 
I have great hope that in the century before us, men 
and women will make a higher attempt to live the 
very gospel itself. They will not value truth less, 
but right conduct more; and above all things else 
they will emphasize with St. Paul the humanness 
of religion, the friendships of life, the Christian 
associations that take out of daily experience the 
bitterness and heartache. The real Trinity is vital, 

12 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

not metaphysical; God in Christ, and Christ in us, 
and we in God. 

New Truth Out of the Old 

The Spirit of the Lord fulfills, it never destroys. 
One truth does not pass away and another take its 
place. The Spirit breathes into the old truth and 
it expands into new beauty, presenting itself to the 
mind in some fresh form of attractiveness. Says 
Dr. Munger in his "Freedom of Faith ": "It is, 
I doubt not, a matter of conscious experience with 
many, this fresh insight into truth — the germ or 
heart remaining the same, but taking on new forms 
and displaying new powers. It is such a relation 
to truth that keeps the mind delighted with it, 
exciting it by sweet surprises and inspiring it by 
new prospects. Thus it becomes living water, 
springing up into eternal life. ,, 

The People Most Alive 

I can sincerely affirm that the best people I have 
ever known, those who have been most alive, have 
been people who came to me in troubled uncertainty 
of soul, people who could not rest content to float 

13 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

with the tide upon an old raft of traditional opinion 
trusting that it would bring them to some shore. 
Not that. They must plunge into the cold waters 
and strike out for themselves. These are they for 
whom we should gladly make a place in the church, 
people ready to say with the old philosopher who 
was more Christian than he knew, " If any man is 
able to convince me and show me that I do not 
think or act right, I will gladly change; for I seek 
the truth, by which no man was ever injured. " 

The Making of Manhood 

We know that the experiences of life which have 
made us in any high sense men and women, are not 
the experiences that stand related to ease, luxury, 
self-indulgence, to freedom from all care and re- 
sponsibility, but those that stand related to hardship 
and toil, to self-sacrifice and the iron discipline of 
a law which has constrained us to have regard, not 
alone for our own things, but for the things of others. 
Rare is the man who can look back over his life 
and not confess, at least to himself, that the things 
which have made him most a man are the very 
things from which he tried with all his soul to 
escape. 

14 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 
The Secret of Spiritual Blessing 

Everywhere in the New Testament the fulfilling 
of moral obligations is made the condition of re- 
ceiving spiritual blessings. From the first page 
of Matthew to the last page of Revelation, it is 
the same story. The disciples, and those who came 
after them, sought to broaden and deepen the com- 
mon religious life by persuading the people to follow 
Jesus, to keep his commandments, to fulfill their 
obligations of charity and justice and righteousness. 
" Live as Jesus lived " was their exhortation, " and 
the same spiritual experiences that filled his soul 
with joy will flood your own." 



Science and the Future Life 

As we emerge to-day from the doubts and fears 
incident to the attack upon the Christian teaching 
of the future life, we find this precious truth more 
firmly established than ever. Though science gives 
us little comfort, it has at least no testimony that 
need dim our hope: we are free to build our faith 
upon the facts that shape themselves out of man's 
religious nature ; we are free to ask ourselves, What 

15 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

mean these intimations of immortality that stir with- 
in the soul of man ? 

" Here sits he, shaping wings to fly; 
His heart forebodes a mystery; 
He names the name Eternity! " 



Every Man His Own Mediator 

Let no church nor priest nor belief nor ceremony 
stand between your soul and God. Understand 
that you may be your own priest, your own me- 
diator. The church may help you; if it is both 
intelligent and spiritual, it will. The preacher, by 
clearness of thought and integrity of character, may 
point out the way and inspire confidence therein. 
Ceremony, ritual, the Bible, may contribute their 
utmost. Above all, the Master himself may obtrude 
his gracious " Follow me." But in the end you 
must find God for yourself, find him in the depths 
of your own conscious experience. No other evi- 
dence will ever satisfy you of his existence and love. 
Everything else is liable to go down under the storm 
of modern criticism. 



16 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 
"To the Unknown God" 

Paul found an altar in Athens and on it an in- 
scription, " To the Unknown God." He changed 
that inscription and made it read, " To the God 
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." The Paul- 
type of men believed that Jesus had known God as 
father, that he had explored the spiritual realm, that 
he would lead them into the same knowledge of the 
unknown which he himself had gained. They were 
not repeating the old assault upon the unknown, nor 
dashing themselves against an unseen foe that beat 
them back. They did not enlist for the conquest 
of the unknown with an expectation of defeat. " So 
fight I," exclaimed the Apostle Paul, " not as one 
that beateth the air." 

Why Men Deny the Teachings of Faith 

Where one man denies God because of some intel- 
lectual difficulty, a hundred deny him that they 
may liberate themselves from the demands he makes 
upon their lives. Where one man refuses to accept 
the brotherhood of the race because of some peculiar 
social philosophy, a hundred deny it to escape obli- 
gations that such a doctrine would involve. There 

17 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

are many people who reject Christianity through 
some difficulty of belief as they declare, when, if 
the truth were told, it is some selfish idol of the 
heart which Christianity would destroy. Thus do 
we deceive ourselves. Thus do .we juggle with most 
sacred convictions in order to escape responsibility. 

Repentance Cannot Unravel the Past 

Ministers sometimes present the gospel of Christ 
as if it were a scheme for undoing the evil that man 
has done. The gospel is Christ's revelation of the 
way God makes the most out of what is left. How 
can it be more? Repentance enables a man to knit 
together into some form of service or beauty the ex- 
periences of succeeding days; but it does not enable 
him to unravel the past. The blessing which hung 
upon the opportunity thrust aside yesterday is gone 
forever and no power on earth or in heaven can 
bring it back. Even though we seek it " carefully 
with tears," it shall not be found; God Himself 
could not bestow it upon us if He would. 

The Star That Leads to Christ 

Do not let the poetry and romance and mystery 
of the brooding sky go out of life. Keep your eyes 

18 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

on the star. There will be hours when the world 
seems desolate and the sky above black as midnight, 
hours when you cannot see the star. Then I would 
have you remember the story of the wise men ; how 
they lost the star and found it again; how it led 
them at last to the feet of the holy child. Because 
your eyes are dim, or because the clouds have shut 
down black and threatening, do not make the mis- 
take of thinking the star has gone out. It is there 
somewhere, glowing and brilliant! Keep your face 
turned heavenward; you will see it burning again 
and rejoice. 

The Call to an Adventurous Life 

The gospel for young men is the gospel that 
appeals to their love of the adventurous. The 
call that quickens them to instant response is not 
the call to a happy life, but the call that gives 
them some wide field on which to test their powers. 
Well did Garibaldi know the human heart when he 
issued the proclamation that thrilled the young men 
of Italy: " In return for the love you may bear your 
country, I offer you hunger, and thirst, cold, war, 
and death. Whoever accepts the terms, let him 
follow me." Likewise, Christ knew to what pur- 

19 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

pose he was speaking when he said: "If any man 
will be my disciple, let him deny himself, and take 
up his cross, and follow me. 

Health of Soul 

A man does not develop health of body solely 
through resources within his physical organism. He 
develops such health by the adjustment of his organ- 
ism to the restorative powers outside of it, through 
the air he breathes and the food he eats. Nor does 
a man develop health of soul wholly through deep 
restorative powers of spirituality within himself. 
He develops such health by a proper adjustment 
of his inner being to the great sources of spiritual 
strength outside of his personal self. " There is 
a spirit in man," exclaimed the old writer, " and 
the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them under- 
standing." 

The Season of Visions 

Children believe, and so do young men and maid- 
ens, if they have lived a normal life. The spring is 
moving within them. The creative forces expand the 
soul. It is the season of visions. The false dis- 
tinctions between art and nature are as yet un- 

20 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

learned. The first reading of the world quickens 
every noble enthusiasm. Like God, they look upon 
creation and pronounce it " very good." Spring has 
called them ; they know nothing of the procession of 
the seasons, the satiety of summer, the decay of au- 
tumn, the cold despair and death of winter. The 
creed of youth is brief: God is good, and the world 
is fair to look upon. 



Love and Spiritual Daring 

That love can never die is the essential thought 
of Easter. Things sweep by us and on beyond us, 
but love remains. Though the stone were so heavy 
that a legion of angels could not move it, love would 
cleave it asunder and come forth from the tomb. 
Blind are the men w4io say of the old sweet stories, 
the nursery tales of the childhood of the race, 
" Myths and legends and therefore untrue! " There 
is no tale of such wild fancy that it does not root 
itself in some age-long impulse or some yearning of 
the human heart. It is the finest rapture of spiritual 
daring when some soul dares to scorn death and 
declare that the soul will never die. Though the 
floods of death roll in, they can never quench love. 

21 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 
The Hidden Man 

Within this mortal nature which God has given us 
there is an immortal nature. Within this outer man 
seen to the eye is an inner man that cannot be seen. 
And as the body partakes of its physical environ- 
ment and becomes strong, so may the living spirit 
which loves and thinks and wills, partake of the di- 
vine nature. Do not think that I am speaking a 
language of mystery; all men and women of spiritual 
discernment have glimpses of this sublime truth. 
God verily imparts himself to men. If this be not 
so, then the universe is a dead universe, there is no 
hope of immortality, our human nature is not, and 
never can be, divine. 

Something Not to be Denied 

You may contend that Jesus was mistaken or 
you may even affirm that he deceived the race; but 
you cannot deny that he filled a worn-out, wicked, 
hopeless old world with a new philosophy of life, 
with a new impulse of feeling, with a new and 
resplendent hope. He lifted a maimed and broken 
humanity to its feet, and sent it on its way rejoic- 
ing. What more could he have done than that; 

22 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

what other thing would have been more worth 
doing ? He who puts new heart into you, who gives 
you new hope, who causes your soul to rejoice, he 
it is who renders you the highest service that God 
makes possible for man to render. 

Hours That We Remember 

There are hours when the soul hears and sees 
what cannot be put into words, hours when the 
foolish desires of earth pass away and the cheap 
ambitions of worldly strife are all forgotten, hours 
of strange and mystical exaltation when only God 
seems real and the eternal life of love with him 
the only joy worth having. What are all the cold 
speculations of philosophy to him who has known 
one such hour as this, to him who has knelt beneath 
the stars at night alone with some bitter sorrow, and 
stretching lame hands of faith towards the silent 
heavens, has felt himself comforted? He knows, 
with a knowledge w4iich is the surest certainty of 
life, that love can never lose its own. 

The Chief Work of the Church 

That is a shallow criticism which judges Christi- 
anity by the number of its emergency cases. There 

23 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

will, of course, always be necessity for heroic grap- 
pling with men who have sunk to low depths of evil ; 
Christianity will always be called to a direct attack 
on wickedness; for so long as there is the poisoned 
soul there must be the spiritual antidote. But I 
protest against considering this the chief work of 
the church. Our highest aim is not to cure spirit- 
ual diseases, but to prevent their entrance into the 
soul. This is why the Sunday school is a higher 
order of service than the revival meeting. The lat- 
ter is a hospital, the former a gymnasium. 



What Keeps the World Sweet 

Every child is a special creation; every child has 
his own point of view; every child has built his 
own little observation tower in some strange and 
secret place apart, a tower you will never find un- 
less you come to it by the shining path of love. It 
is this love for little children that keeps the world 
sweet ; it is this love that Jesus seized upon and made 
the norm of his theology. Take this love out of the 
home and it ceases to be a home ; take this love out of 
the school-room and it becomes a prison-house. To 
love the child we ourselves must have the child- 

24 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

heart; and without the child-heart — hear the words 
of Jesus himself — " ye cannot enter the kingdom of 
God." 

All the World Loves a Lover 

In all the literature of the world is there another 
such love story as that recorded in the last chap- 
ters of the Gospel of St. John? If it is true that 
all the world loves a lover, then it is clear why the 
hearts of men and women everywhere have been won 
to Jesus Christ. Jesus loved his disciples out of 
themselves into one another, out of themselves into 
God. He loved them in spite of themselves and 
with a love that refused to be denied. He loved 
them in the old happy days when he had chosen 
them ; he loved them through all experiences of toil 
and suffering and triumph ; and " having loved his 
own which were in the world, he loved them unto 
the end." 

Hearing and Doing the Word 

Every minister of Christ has one great lesson 
to learn and until he has learned it his work is as 
chaff scattered by the gale. Not by any ability of 
thought or grasp of truth, not by any gift of speech 

25 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

or power of playing upon the emotions of the heart, 
not by these things is the minister to be judged. It 
is the success with which he converts truth and sym- 
pathy into a compelling will that shall grip men 
and women and send them forth into the world 
as hands and feet for his message, it is this, and 
this alone, that measures his worth. There is no 
judgment so crushing to the minister as that passed 
by the Lord upon Ezekiel: " For they hear thy 
words, but they do them not.'' 

The Wine of the Soul 

Where in all literature will you find another 
such wildly impossible piece of writing as the sec- 
ond chapter of the Acts? As we read the record of 
that seemingly lawless upheaval of spiritual power, 
we do not wonder that the onlookers " were all 
amazed, and were in doubt, saying one to another, 
What meaneth this? Others mocking said, These 
men are full of new wine." Full of new wine in- 
deed ! It was the wine of a new presence and new 
power in life; the wine of a great love filling their 
days with tireless effort to create a heaven on earth 
and filling their nights with dreams of that heaven 

26 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

attained. Yes, these " devout men out of every na- 
tion " were full of a wine that was new — intoxicated 
with the quickening, soul-refreshing sense of God. 

Emmanuel — God With Us 

The Immanence of God is a profound philosoph- 
ical truth, but not a truth that reaches the heart. 
It is the Presence of God made known to us in the 
redeeming, loving, sanctifying power of the Christ, 
this it is that sways and turns the lives of men. 
Herein is a weakness of the new theology; it has 
said too much about the immanence of God as a 
cold, philosophical abstraction, and too little about 
the actual presence of God as a living power at the 
heart of life. The Scripture never talks about the 
immanence of God in his universe; its one life- 
breathing utterance is this: " Emmanuel — God with 
us." 

The Touch of the Hand 

Jesus' pity of men always found an outlet in 
kindly deed: he " took him by the hand." His was 
the gospel of brotherhood, sympathy, fellow-feeling. 
He did not send forth his gospel as a beautiful the- 
ory, he brought it himself in his open hands. " And 
Jesus moved with compassion, put forth his hand 

27 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

and touched him." It is this that we need in our 
Christianity to-day. The church is giving to the 
world in a thousand beautiful charities, but above 
all else it should give itself. This weary old world 
needs something more than gifts ; it needs The Gos- 
pel of the Loving Hand. 

Individual Immortality 

The only immortality the human heart can sin- 
cerely and passionately long for is an immortality 
that assures the personality of ourselves and those 
we love. To seek to comfort the soul with any 
other hope is to give a stone when the cry is for 
bread. The immortality for which your heart longs 
is an immortality that binds you through all eternity 
in companionship with those you have known and 
loved. No vague shadowy teaching of universal ab- 
sorption, or of spiritual communion through an im- 
mortality of influence, can satisfy the heart of the 
man or woman who silently commits some loved 
one to the waiting earth. 

" Communion in spirit? Forgive me, 
But I, who am earthy and weak, 
Would give all my incomes from dreamland 
For the touch of her hand on my cheek." 

28 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 
Necessity of Organization 

Combined effort is the secret of all truly suc- 
cessful work. Carpenter and goldsmith and black- 
smith must work together. It is so in the indus- 
trial world: the wide commerce of the world is 
based on cooperation, and when this is undermined 
chaos impends. By what law of spiritual dynamics 
is love set free from the same necessity? There is 
no sanctity of womanhood apart from the organiza- 
tion of the family. There is no high order of intel- 
ligence apart from the organization of the school. 
And there can be no general and far-reaching tri- 
umph of love apart from the organization of the 
church. To " believe in the Holy Catholic Church " 
does not mean that I believe in the divine relation- 
ship for myself alone; it also means that I believe 
in it for other men — all men, everywhere. 

The Misfortune of Being Fortunate 

Have we chafed under the yoke of some afflic- 
tion that we did not understand? Have we won- 
dered why pain is here, and why sorrow is here? 
Do we count ourselves unfortunate because we are 
passing through changes that bring us into deep 

29 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

places of loneliness and trial? Let us be wiser. 
These changes which we call the misfortunes of life 
are but the rounds of the ladder by which we climb 
up unto God. The greatest of all misfortunes in 
life is no other than the missing of experiences, 
whatever they may be, which turn the soul from 
self to the Eternal. This is the conclusion of the 
psalmist in the plaintive and beautiful utterance: 
" Cast your burden on the Lord and He shall sus- 
tain thee, He shall never suffer the righteous to be 
moved." 

Our Growth Into Childhood 

The things in our Christianity that a child can- 
not learn are not worth teaching. Our need is 
not to think less, but to feel more; not to go back 
to childishness of mind, but back to childlike- 
ness of soul; not to cease wrestling with difficult 
problems of the reasoning intellect, but to keep in 
all our questionings the simplicity and humbleness 
of those who have the teachable spirit. We are 
to go on to manhood and womanhood taking our 
childhood with us, penetrating deeper and deeper 
into its original and heavenly spirit. " Are we 
never/' said Martineau in that fine word of spiritual 

30 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

yearning, " to blend the fresh heart of childhood 
with the large mind of age, and so recover the lost 
harmonies of life? " 

The National Awakening 

For years the church has been praying for a 
revival. The revival is here ; but it is not the church 
alone that is stirred, it is the whole nation. Let 
us thank God it is not a revival shut up to prayer- 
meetings. It is out in the wide world, a fire that 
has got away from us. Public conscience is being 
awakened. We are coming to ourselves as a people. 
Of course the old ideals will come back, the old 
standards will be set up again. But meanwhile I 
dare hope that the Christian church will see its 
duty and face it squarely; I dare hope that the day 
will soon come when it will not be uncommon for 
a church to stand by a minister who speaks out on 
the great questions with which all earnest men 
should be wrestling. 

How Artists Misinterpret the Bible 

If a painter wishes to represent faith, or hope, 
or love, he sets forth some delicate conception of 

31 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

womanly character or beauty. Can you think of a 
single masterpiece in which faith is represented as 
a strong-limbed young man with keen and rugged 
face? Why should the artists choose women and 
children as their models when they are painting 
angels? It is clearly against the Scripture; there 
the angels are always young men. And why should 
artists put so much sadness into the face of the 
Christ, when from the gospel representation we 
know that he was strong and vibrant with life, radi- 
ating joy and quickening men to enthusiasm by his 
very presence? Speaking for myself, I am quite 
sure that I would never have thrown down my fish- 
ing nets to follow the sort of man set forth by the 
conventional hymn and painting. 

The True Test of Discipleship 

I would not have you think that Christ consid- 
ered unimportant what men believed, and especially 
what they thought of him. Far from it. A man's 
theology was not a thing of little moment to Jesus. 
He was continually dwelling upon the importance 
of the truth. " Whom do men say that I am?" he 
asked the disciples on a certain occasion; and the 
question is not without vital interest to-day. But 

32 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

mental assent is not the thing that determines a 
man's discipleship. " I would rather," said Phillips 
Brooks, " a man should believe that Jesus was not 
God and live as though he were, than have him be- 
lieve that Jesus was God and live as though he were 
not." 

A Parable of the Seed 

There is one parable in the New Testament which 
has always impressed me deeply. " The kingdom of 
God is as if a man should sleep and rise night and 
day, and the seed should spring up and grow, he 
knoweth not how." Why should we be continu- 
ally digging up the seed w T e plant to see if it be 
growing? Prepare the ground, plant the seed, 
and then go apart and rest, sleeping peacefully, 
trusting that God will bring forth the harvest. 
We should do our work bit by bit, as occasion 
requires. The issue of the w^ork should not deeply 
concern us. We should take on our shoulders no 
more than we can fitly carry. People may find 
fault with us, but we are not responsible to people. 
We should accustom ourselves to breathe the atmos- 
phere of rest and open our souls to the sweet in- 
fluences of peace. 

33 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 
The Hour That Now Is 

If we would live for the future it is essential to 
live for the life opening out to us here and now. If 
we fail for time, we fail for eternity. We are not 
to put the dreams of immortality out of life; we 
are to live to-day with our eyes fixed on to-morrow ; 
and being faithful to the demands of time, we shall 
come at last to the higher experiences of eternity. 
It is on earth that the New Heaven is to be re- 
vealed to us. We are to be Christian men and 
women, not because we are going to die, but be- 
cause we are going to live. " The hour cometh," 
says the old Scripture, and then explains: " The 
hour cometh and now is" The oncoming hour is 
wrapped up in the hour that now is, and we live 
for to-morrow by living in the actual to-day. 

Every Citizen Should Know His Own 
City 

Men should study their city ; it should be mapped 
out in their minds ; they should know its streets and 
avenues, its parks and public buildings; they should 
know its asylums and institutions, its schools and 
churches ; they should know how the different classes 

34 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

live and by what occupations the masses are sup- 
ported; they should acquaint themselves with the 
needs of the poor and the agencies of charity; they 
should familiarize themselves with the different de- 
partments of government, and watch with untiring 
vigilance the workings of practical politics. In brief, 
the first and most important service any man can 
render the city he lives in is to acquaint himself 
thoroughly with every phase of its complex life. 



The Great Thought of the Nineteenth 
Century 

Mr. Drummond in The Ascent of Man says that 
the nineteenth century's one great contribution to 
the thought of the world is the idea of evolution. 
It has invaded and revolutionized every branch of 
knowledge except theology. It has now reached 
theology and will revolutionize that. Evolution is 
the doctrine that God did not make things all at 
once, " out of hand." He did not make the world 
as a boy makes a mud house, nor does he control it, 
as an engineer controls his engine, from without. 
His creation is a long process of unfolding from the 
simple to the complex. God does not work from 

35 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

without, but from within. This is the great thought 
of the nineteenth century; this is the new bottle into 
which must be poured the old wine of religious truth. 

Preaching the Terrors of the Lord 

There are those who tell us that the Christian 
life begins in the conviction and repentance of -sin. 
They would persuade men by preaching " the ter- 
rors of the Lord." The Christian life begins the 
moment a man begins to realize the power and 
beauty of the divine love. There is no genuine con- 
viction of sin that fails to follow an awakening 
to this sublimest truth in the universe, the truth 
that man is the child of a heavenly Father who 
never ceases to care for him. A repentance that 
does not grow out of love is only an artificial forc- 
ing of one's nature under the impulse of fear. 
Preaching the terrors of the Lord may drive men to 
a form of morality, but only the proclamation of 
a Father's love can win them to an eager acceptance 
of the moral life for its own great ends. 

Things in City Life to Weep Over 

The things in our city to weep over: are they the 
alleys reeking with neglect and full of suffering and 

36 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

want ; the low taverns, breeders of crime and defiant 
of law ; the houses of shame, pest centres of degrada- 
tion and disease? How about the indifference of 
those to whom much has been intrusted ; the shame- 
ful shirking of responsibility by those who have 
wealth, learning, and power; the abdication by the 
" best people " of the rights and privileges of citi- 
zenship; the selfishness of those who coolly let per- 
sonal interests absorb all their time and all their 
strength; — are not these the things, and these the 
people, to w^eep over? 

The Need of a Great Cause 

It cannot be too much emphasized that Chris- 
tianity has only incidentally to do with a man's per- 
sonal salvation and happiness. The end which it 
sets before itself is the establishment of the kingdom 
of God on earth. It is a world-wide enterprise. 
There are idols to be pulled down and ideals to be 
lifted up. We need to broaden the scope of our 
work and to deepen the range of our vision. We 
must have an incentive worthy to set young men on 
fire. If they have the glow of manhood in them, 
they will not kindle long over the matter of their 
personal salvation. They must be taken up and 

37 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

out of themselves; they must be given a great cause 
worthy to love and worthy to fight for. 



Only One Religion 

The great religions of the world we describe to 
ourselves as very different from one another. But 
are the differences really as marked as we suppose? 
Are they anything more than differences arising 
from the complexities of environment? The tall 
pine of the Maine forest looks quite different from 
the small " scrub pine " of Cape Cod. But each is 
a pine, a true pine, in its own way. The differences 
are only those of soil and climate. In all that is 
essential to the pine nature, the two are brothers. 
Likewise, in the broad field of human life there is 
but one religion; — many religions, as has been said, 
but only one universal spiritual religion. Its ad- 
herents are those who are striving to live together 
as brothers and feeling after God, if haply they may 
find him. 

Two Kinds of Materialism 

Materialism as a philosophy has doubtless lost its 
hold upon present-day thought; but materialism as 
a gross, stupid, every-day fact of physical existence 

38 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

is getting a firmer and firmer hold upon the lives 
of men. Some things we cannot well deny. This 
is an age of moral laxity, an age of greed and luxury. 
Not only are the old ideals of honesty violated, but 
worse than that, men who ought to be behind prison 
bars seem wholly unaware that they have done any- 
thing wrong. Everywhere we find a startling indif- 
ference to ethical and religious principles. If one 
extreme produces another, then far enough from 
Puritanism have we surely swung. 

The Golden Day at Hand 

In the hope of a new world, a new order, a new 
brotherhood, let us do our work. Let us rejoice 
that the best things lie before us. Let us not think 
that we are living in the twilight of the ages, that 
our own civilization is wearing out and the world 
becoming weary through to the heart of it. It is 
not evening, but morning. Here and there the 
light that streams out of the East touches some 
mountain peak. Down every hillside and through 
every valley the shadows are disappearing. Al- 
ready it is morning, and the golden day for which 
men have labored and waited so long is at hand. 
The religion of a universal brotherhood is being 

39 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

everywhere accepted, and out of that religion will 
come a church broad in its thought, deep in its 
sympathies, and untiring in its service to our com- 
mon humanity. 



How God Answers Prayer 

I would call prayer that practice of the con- 
scious soul by which we appropriate to ourselves 
the life and love of God. When men had a material 
view of religion and God was away somewhere 
among the stars, prayer was a puzzling and dif- 
ficult problem of faith. But if God is a part of 
our soul's being, then prayer is the exercise of man's 
spirit by which the divine within him is liberated. 
Prayer increases the God-life: it is most reasonable, 
therefore, to pray. Not that I may set aside the 
laws of the universe, God himself cannot set those 
laws aside; not that I may have my wishes granted, 
but that he may have his desire granted towards 
me ; not that the will of Providence may be changed 
to suit my wants, but that my will may be changed 
to suit his purpose. Thus prayer is changed at a 
stroke from a material to a spiritual institution, and 
as such we are to regard it and to use it. 

40 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 
A World-Shaking Adventure 

Always in the ears of the Apostle Paul, sounded 
the tramp of armed legions. Seldom do you find 
him discussing with men the question of their per- 
sonal happiness. There was no tame and colorless 
conventionality in the gospel that Paul preached. 
It was a world-shaking adventure, an audacious at- 
tempt to remake human society. Paul's scheme was 
on so vast a scale that men's imaginations caught 
fire. Because he set seemingly impossible tasks, 
men girded themselves for what they knew would 
be a struggle to the death. Had Paul preached 
a gospel of personal happiness, he would never have 
impressed his age. But when, as to the men of 
Ephesus, he cried out : " We wrestle not against flesh 
and blood, but against principalities, against powers, 
against the rulers of the darkness of this world, 
against spiritual wickedness in high places " — that 
was a soul-stirring reveille which brought men by 
the thousand to his standard. 

Who Are the "Good People "? 

It was said of Jesus that " He went about doing 
good." Accordingly it would seem that goodness 

41 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

is something that needs to get itself done in the 
world. We say that the soil is good if it produces; 
that the trees are good if they bear fruit. And 
is not a good man one in whom the Christian graces 
find outlet in deeds of benevolence? The time has 
come to stop calling people good simply because 
of their professions, or because of a peculiar tone 
of voice they use in their prayers. The good man 
is he who does good. It is a necessity of nature that 
a good tree shall bud and blossom and bear fruit, 
and it is a necessity of man's spiritual nature that 
goodness shall find an outlet in deeds of justice and 
mercy. 

The Unnaturalness of "Natural De- 
pravity " 

The way of sin may be alluring, but it can not be 
the natural way for any man. Never forget the 
story of the prodigal and the words of Jesus: " He 
came to himself/' The words were not spoken of 
the young man when he was revelling in vice, but 
after he had repented and turned back to his father. 
All the time his true self had been there, buried 
deep within him. Now it had asserted itself and 

42 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

he had decided to be a man. There is something 
better in every man than he has realized. The 
very fact that the most wicked of men are often 
transformed into the most virtuous is an unan- 
swerable argument for a faith in the perfectibil- 
ity of all men. 

" Dw T elt there no divineness in us, 
How could God's divineness win us? " 

Through Man to God 

So great was the faith of St. Paul in the divine- 
ness of man that he deduced the glory of God from 
the nobility of his creature. That was the point of 
his speech to the Athenians on Mars Hill. Again, 
in his letter to the Colossians he declares that in 
Christ dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead. He 
prays, further, for the Ephesians that they may be 
filled with this fulness. Thus he makes the divinity 
of Jesus an argument for the divinity of man. The 
Bible everywhere maintains that our life is derived 
from God; that in our nature there is the divine 
possibility. God dwells in us, shines in us, speaks 
in us, thrills us with strange and sacred aspirations 
towards truth and goodness and beauty. He has 
not left himself without a witness ; for the very idea 

43 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

we have of God is a kind of proof that he lives in 
us, and is striving through us to voice himself to the 
world. 

Concerning Trivial Experiences 

The most important things of life often hang 
upon the most trivial incidents. Unwind the tangled 
thread of any day's experience and see how you have 
been turned hither and thither by little things. 
Or take some instance of great good fortune. An- 
alyze it and you will find that at some particular 
point you might have missed it by a hair's breadth. 
We carelessly divide our lives into parts; certain 
experiences we say are worth while and others we 
regard as trivial and unimportant. Such a habit 
falls short of wisdom. Events by themselves may 
be insignificant, but nothing really stands by itself 
in this complex life we are living. Great things 
result from small, and a man's whole life may be 
changed by pausing to speak to a friend on the 
street. 

What This Age Most Values 

This age is losing sight of the high estimate Jesus 
placed upon the soul of man. The difficulty does not 

44 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

He in our failure to see that a certain kind of life 
means debasement of soul. We see that very clearly. 
The difficulty lies in the fact that men and women 
choose to barter away, with eyes wide open, the 
high things of Christian faith, fine feelings, pure 
thoughts, noble aspirations, fear and reverence 
towards God, all these that they may dwell in ease 
and gratify the cheap desires of a merely physical 
life. When a man puts the comforts and indul- 
gences of material existence above growth and en- 
richment of soul, the open vision is lost; he may 
indeed gain the world, but how about his own life ? 



Out of the Soul's Depth 

God is not some mysterious power that filters 
down through the stars. He is the living Spirit 
that stirs in the depths beneath the depth of our 
conscious being, the sacred impulse behind all sincere 
thought and genuine feeling. What cares the man 
who has known within him, if only for an hour, 
this commanding sense of God that lifts him and 
sweeps him out of himself to life's diviner issues, 
what cares he for the shaking down of theological 
systems born in the musty atmosphere of a class- 

45 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

room? We are not to build our faith on systems 
of thought that would define God; we are to raise 
our faith on the sense, native to every man, of a 
spiritual reality that wells up out of the unfathom- 
able depths of the human soul. 

" Our little systems have their day ; 

They have their day and cease to be; 

They are but broken lights of Thee, 

And Thou, O Lord, art more than they." 

Art and Religion 

All about us is scattered loveliness of form and 
color. Between the splendor of earth and sky and 
that which the old Hebrew called the beauty of 
holiness, there must be some connecting link. Be- 
tween the exquisite loveliness of a June morning 
and the sainthood of character set forth in the words, 
" Blessed are the pure in heart," there must be some 
natural affinity. Loveliness of form and loveliness 
of character belong to one perfect whole. The 
true artist must be religious, and he who is truly 
spiritual must enter into the rapture of the things 
that are seen. That piety is false which does not 
cause the heart to sing and the eye to glisten as it 
looks upon the wonders of earth and sea and sky. 

4 6 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 
The Truth of All Truths 

The Deism of our fathers affirmed a God wholly 
outside of his world, controlling the cosmic mech- 
anism as one would control a machine. The Panthe- 
ism prevalent in contemporary thought identifies 
God with his world. But men are coming to see that 
under either view there is no place for the vital 
teaching of the church ; such a teaching, for instance, 
as prayer. Once grasp the thought that God dwells 
in and yet transcends the world, as the soul dwells 
in and yet transcends the body, and you have opened 
the way for Divine communion with man. You 
have made it possible for God to incarnate himself 
in man ; you have made it possible for him to inspire 
man; you have made it possible for him to answer 
the prayer of man; and all without resort to crude 
miracle or a supernaturalism that science utterly dis- 
credits. 

Things Which Abide 

What now survives of all that was supreme in 
the thought of men when St. Paul wrote his let- 
ters? What is left of the imposing materialism of 
that day, what of the wealth and the splendor of the 

47 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

Caesars? Where now are the labored conclusions 
of the Greek philosophy ? Kings have died and em- 
pires have fallen. All things have changed or passed 
away. No; not all. The religion of Jesus still 
lives. That which men counted folly has become 
the wisdom of the world. " God hath chosen the 
weak things of this world to confound the mighty." 
Only the great simplicities of life stand. Love 
abides forever. The words of Jesus live because 
they were simple and true, because they appealed 
to the highest in the mind and soul, because they 
dealt with the immortal yearnings of the human 
heart, because they were the hope and promise of 
eternal life. 

What Shall We Do? 

Everywhere men are asking each other the ques- 
tion, What is to be done? And everywhere, also, 
they are impatient at the mention of any ideal of 
social or religious progress that seems to disregard 
the practical steps by which the ideal is to be 
achieved. There is a principle in physics which we 
would do well not to let slip ; namely, that there is 
no way of passing from one point to another with- 
out passing over all the points between. The mod- 

4 8 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

ern statement of this principle is what we call the 
doctrine of evolution, the doctrine which affirms that 
the thing of to-morrow is made out of the thing that 
exists to-day. Men may denounce as they choose 
the existing order of things. The ideal that the fu- 
ture is to realize is not floating like some splendid 
sun-lit cloud above our heads; it is here under our 
feet, hid deep within the world-stuff of our common 
life. 

Divine Discontent 

Christianity has discovered to us the possibilities 
of our own nature. It has uncovered the depths 
and revealed the heights. It has opened up a new 
world, wider than the spaces between the stars, 
the world of a man's own soul. It has given us 
so great a faith in our latent powers that we beat 
like caged birds at the prison bars. Are our lives 
poor and low and mean? There are hours when 
we would have them otherwise, when we dream 
dreams and see visions and hear voices that speak 
to us of a life unfettered, as free as the mountain 
air. We would be out in the wide spaces of the 
earth; we would visit strange lands, and look upon 
the wonders of creation; we would know the ways 
of men and taste their varied experiences. Lo! books 

49 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

to read, pictures to see, music to hear, all the world 
of beauty and multiplied experience and rapt de- 
light to lay siege to, all the world a garden built 
by the Lord, — but angels at the entrance with flam- 
ing swords! 

What Science Has Done and Failed to Do 

Account for the origin and development of man's 
body as you may, there is something more you must 
account for. That something more is the profound 
mystery of his spiritual being. At this point science 
has given little help. Indeed it is not extravagant 
to say that its claims to fathom the mystery of life, 
to explain the spiritual qualities of heart and mind 
which constitute what we call the higher life of 
man, have utterly broken down. All the researches 
of science having to do with the organized being we 
call man, only serve to bring out and emphasize the 
New Testament claim of his high destiny. When 
the things destroyed by science are removed, it will 
be seen that all which is highest in man, all forces of 
intellect and of conscience, remains unshaken. The 
majestic words of the old Scripture still stand and 
will forever stand: " God said, let us make man in 
our own image." 

50 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 
Relationship and Responsibility 

There is no other source of responsibility than that 
which resides in personal relationship. It were use- 
less, for instance, to attempt to point out religious 
obligations to a man who recognized no relationship 
between himself and a Supreme Being. And to one 
who denied the brotherhood of man, what argument 
could you advance for the assumption by him of par- 
ticular obligations of charity? Without reasoning 
about the matter, people as by instinct feel responsi- 
bility where relationship is involved. Why should 
parents feel more directly responsible for their own 
children than for those of others? They recognize 
a kinship that is closer, and from this sense of kin- 
ship springs a keener sense of obligation. The only 
way a man can escape the demand of responsibility, 
is to deny the reality of this network of personal 
relationships into which every life is woven. 

The Christ Consciousness of the Father 

The only argument for the ethical character of 
God which strikes down through my thought and 
roots itself in the fibre of my being, is that which 
springs from Christ, from the consciousness which he 

51 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

had that his Father loved him and had given all 
things into his keeping. When I trust his conscious- 
ness of God and draw near the Father as he leads 
the way, I find that my own consciousness of divine 
goodness and love fills me with a certainty that 
sweeps away every doubt. To those who would 
raise objections, I have only to say: As Christians 
we do not turn to current theologies for our con- 
ception of God, nor do we search the writings of 
the prophets or the apostles; we go to him who 
said to his disciples: " He that hath seen me hath 
seen the Father." Standing in his presence, we have 
no other word than this, God must be as good as 
his best work. 

The Christian Theory of Wealth 

It is a great gain to have reached a point in our 
history where all classes are, in one way or an- 
other, emphasizing the idea that wealth imposes obli- 
gations of stewardship. For the manner in which 
those obligations are met, public opinion is to-day 
holding the man of means accountable. By various 
roads we are coming to that height on which Jesus 
stood when he denied the right of exclusive owner- 
ship in private property and proclaimed man but 

52 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

the steward of a portion of the world's wealth, 
entrusted to him for the advancement of the king- 
dom of heaven on earth. There are other theories 
as to the rights of property, but there can be no 
other Christian theory. A man may deny that his 
wealth is a sacred trust, to be used by him in the 
interests of the kingdom of heaven; but he denies 
it with his eyes shut to every page of the New 
Testament. 

The Only Road to the Ideal 

The world to-day suffers no lack of aimless dream- 
ers, of people who spin out of themselves high the- 
ories and smile patronizingly at old-fashioned folk 
content to work in the harness of a thousand cen- 
turies' making. But sneer as they will, the old- 
fashioned people are still the salt of the earth; they 
are still the people who believe in the homely, sober 
virtues and practice them, who feed the hungry, 
clothe the naked, exact no more than is due them, 
who refrain from violence, tell the blunt truth, and 
live contentedly in the place where God has put 
them. Wherever one turns in the complex life of 
to-day, in business, in politics, in society, in the 
church, he finds hosts of men who have lost their 

53 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

grip upon the stern truth that the road to the ideal 
is straight along the highway of the plain virtues 
to which old-fashioned people cling. 



Christianity a Religion of Hope 

The religion of Jesus, as distinguished from all 
misinterpretations of it, is peculiarly a religion of 
hope. They who interpret it otherwise wholly mis- 
conceive it. If you read the Old Testament you 
will find that the Jews lived very largely in the 
present. Their ideals of righteousness were on the 
whole higher than those of other peoples of their 
age ; but Judaism furnished little inspiration to man 
in his struggle upward. When one turns to the 
New Testament it is like coming out of the Arctic 
seas into the Gulf Stream. There are the same 
high ideals of justice and truth, but there is some- 
thing more, there is a wholly new feeling of hope. 
The prophets of the New Testament look forward, 
their faces are aglow, their words are vibrant with 
good cheer, their lives are transfigured by joy, life 
has taken on new dignity, the soul of man has been 
clothed with new power; it is the old world and 
yet a new world, made new because men are look- 

54 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

ing upon it through new eyes, and going forth to 
take possession of it with new hopes stirring in their 
hearts. 

The Saving Power of Old Associations 

One of the greatest problems a man can face is 
the problem of his associations. Solve that problem 
and all others will open. To fill the life of the 
growing child with high and pure associations is to 
insure him against the future; he can never escape 
their influence, however stern and bitter his after- 
experiences may be. For a man to separate himself 
in thought and feeling from associations which have 
touched him with a sense of high possibilities is to 
lose the very best out of life. Since it started on 
its long road, the soul has gathered into itself many 
motives and inspirations towards goodness: your 
problem and mine is not to find some hidden way 
of salvation; it is to guard and cultivate the inspi- 
rations already known to us; it is to keep alive and 
tender all the ennobling associations of the past. 

A Reality of the Child-Heart 

For the child-heart religion is a reality, a thing of 
trust and hope and love. To preserve the morning 

55 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

glow of spiritual life within us we must let the soul 
have its own way. Now, as always, pride and 
fashion and conventionality tyrannize over men ; and 
now, as never before, analysis of things on earth and 
things in heaven unbalances them. We may strut 
so much or' analyze so persistently that we have no 
time for genuine feeling. In either case, we sacri- 
fice the beauty and fragrance of those holy imagin- 
ings that root themselves in the deepest consciousness 
of our being. We set up our creeds, traditional or 
scientific, in place of spiritual vision. We foolishly 
think that logic means belief, and that when God 
speaks to us it must be through the word of theo- 
logian or philosopher or scientist. Have we not too 
long forgotten the prayer of the Master: " I thank 
Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because 
Thou hast hid these things from the wise and 
prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." 

Men Sent From God 

Here and there God sends men into the world 
who seem born to set their fellows free, who in- 
spire in them ardor of soul for the great simplicities 
deeper lying that all distinctions of epoch or nation 
or class. They give us back to ourselves ; they burn 

56 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

up the distinctions men have made and bring to the 
light of day the common gifts bestowed by the Cre- 
ator on all humankind; they set us in eternal rela- 
tionships. They lay bare the things that are deep 
and undying, the things that dwell in the heart ; they 
utter for us, as we cannot for ourselves, the holy 
memories of home, the joys and hopes of childhood, 
the dreams of youth, the friendships and loves and 
struggles of manhood, and the silent longings of old 
age. As we come under the spell of their genius, 
we feel our hearts burn within us, as the hearts of 
the disciples burned, listening to their Lord on the 
road to Emmaus. 

The Greatest Question in the World 

In all the literature of spiritual denial a more har- 
rowing chapter would be hard to find than The 
Death of the Soul in Professor Haeckers " Riddle 
of the Universe." But in that atmosphere of freez- 
ing negation we are shocked out of easy complacency 
into a new sense of great and abiding values. The 
strength of our protest is eloquent of the power over 
us of the immortal hope. " If a man die shall he 
live again ? " For every one of us there is coming 
an hour when this will be the only question in the 

57 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

world. " Nobody,' , said Socrates, discussing per- 
sonal immortality with his friends in that last great 
hour of his life, " can pretend that I am talking of 
what does not concern me at this time." Every 
other question sinks into insignificance beside this: 
Am I a mere waif of waste matter, or am I an im- 
mortal faring towards home? 

Responsibility of the Scholar 

Once men thought of scholarship simply as a po- 
lite embellishment. Now they are beginning to talk 
about learning as a responsibility. We are coming to 
see that the law of responsibility applies to the col- 
lege quite as much as to the factory. The man who 
considers education a thing for the study alone is 
fast becoming an anachronism. He who never takes 
into the great world of men the torch he has re- 
ceived from the heroic past, is out of place in the 
life of the republic. He is a parasite who, by reason 
of his very learning, deserves even less consideration 
than the man who never stops to think where his 
capital came from, who sees not that all he possesses 
represents the toil and sacrifice and tears of those 
who have labored that other men might enter into 
the fruits of their labor. For every truth that has 

58 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

helped unshackle the world's thought, somebody has 
fought and suffered and died. 

" Thoughts that great hearts once broke for, 
We now breathe cheaply in the common air." 

The Perfectibility of Man 

There has never been a time in the history of the 
race, it is safe to say, when men have realized the 
possibilities of manhood as they do to-day. We be- 
lieve, as no previous age has believed, in the expan- 
siveness of human nature, and hence in its perfecti- 
bility. We believe that God has made us on a scale 
so large that only immortality can afford an opportu- 
nity adequate for the development of all our latent 
powers. Our horizon is widening because our sense 
of reality is deepening. As there is a light prepared 
for the eye formed in darkness; as there is a sound 
for the ear built in silence, so there is a reality to meet 
the prophetic groping of the human soul. This is the 
faith so beautifully expressed by Tennyson in the 
well-known lines: 

" That nothing walks with aimless feet ; 
That not one life shall be destroyed, 
Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
When God hath made the pile complete. ,, 

59 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 
A Question Beneath a Question 

No other teacher ever struck so deep into the soul 
of man as Jesus. He began his teaching by announc- 
ing a fact underlying all other facts conceivable, the 
fact that life has its source in God. Jesus' argu- 
ment for eternal life was this: We live in God, we 
have fellowship with God, God is the secret of our 
life. Hence Jesus never discussed the question of 
the eternal life apart from the profounder question 
of God and our relation to him. If we are made 
in his image, if he cares for us, if our life has its 
source and being in him, then belief in immortality 
is a fact from which we cannot escape. Men ask 
for arguments. What they need is a deeper sense of 
the infinite love. Jesus was sure of the eternal life 
because he was sure of God. His last words bound 
up his faith in immortality with his assurance of 
God : " Father, into Thy hands I commend my 
spirit/' 

Nature to be Interpreted by the Gospel 

The higher must determine the meaning of the 
lower, and not the lower the meaning of the 
higher. Nature is to be interpreted in the light 

60 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

of the gospel; we are not to judge the gospel by 
our blind guesses at what nature teaches. The 
revelation that has come to us through the noblest 
human life is more to be relied upon than the revela- 
tion that comes to us from the dumb realm of na- 
ture which lies beneath. I cannot accept therefore 
the teaching of those who would have us believe 
that in lifting up the weak we are setting ourselves 
against the method of nature. I must believe that 
there is some divine meaning in nature's apparent 
cruelty, and that, if she could cry out, she would 
tell us that she is under a stern and inexorable 
necessity, leading up to some far-away divine pur- 
pose ; I believe that she w^ould implore us, in Christ's 
name, to save those who are down. 

Sins of the Disposition 

Why was it that Jesus' most scathing speech was 
directed towards the religious people, the people who 
prided themselves on their eminent respectability? 
Why was it that he said to them, " The drunkards 
and harlots go into the kingdom of God before 
you " ? It was because he saw that the most subtle 
sins were those rooted in the disposition. The 
prodigal goes into the kingdom of heaven before 

61 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

the elder brother. It is quite possible that the people 
who most need preaching to in this world are those 
who stand within the well-defined limits of conven- 
tional morality. By what right does society regard 
the gross sins of the body as the great sins, while it 
shuts its eyes to the enormity of those subtler sins 
which, though not revealing themselves in the body, 
undermine the character. The sins of real darkness 
are those that do not show themselves on the face 
or in the flesh ; they are hidden away in deep caverns 
of the soul; — passions of greed, of envy, of cruelty, 
all those dispositions of refined and exquisite selfish- 
ness which are more to be feared than the grossest 
dissipation. 

What Constitutes a Great Teacher? 

Who have been the great teachers? They have 
been men with the root of the matter in themselves. 
They have been men who have quickened youth by 
the power of their personalities, and surprised them 
into the great possibilities that lay buried in their 
natures. Learning cannot be separated from man- 
hood in the teacher's profession any more than char- 
acter can be separated from eloquence in the pulpit. 
The presence of noble manhood begets the saving 

62 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

power of hope. Make men believe that they are 
children of the devil and they will act accordingly; 
make them believe that they are the children of God, 
that from him they draw their life, and unto him 
they are rising, and you inspire them with a bound- 
less hope, you send them out into the world to do 
their work with joy. 

Wherein Lies the Failure? 

Various explanations are given for the slow ad- 
vance of the kingdom of God, but we know in our 
hearts where the difficulty lies. The crux of the 
situation is in ourselves. We do not begin to love 
as Jesus loved. We are regardful of our own 
things and half-hearted toward the things of others. 
We piously accept the sacrifice that Jesus made, 
and fail to appreciate that it has no saving power 
except as it leads us to make the same sacrifice 
ourselves. If the words of Christ mean anything, 
they mean that his love is to be the measure of 
our love, his life the pattern of our life, his sac- 
rifice the standard of our sacrifice. Only as Jesus 
loved his disciples better than he loved himself did 
he exercise authority over them. Only as the disci- 
ples placed the interests of the young church above 

63 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

their own interests, only as they loved others better 
than they loved themselves, did they make their re- 
ligion a power among men. 



Divine Love and Human 

Your love for Christ has not the intensity that 
characterizes your love for your child ; your love for 
Christ roots itself in the calm strength of the reason- 
ing spirit. Your love for Christ is not a love that 
must live upon the touch of the hand; it is a love 
that refreshes itself at the deep springs of pure rev- 
erence hidden far back in the wonder realm we 
call the soul. These human loves of ours may be 
more intense, but they have no such depth and per- 
manence as the divine affections that make up the 
sum of our religion. Our love for Christ has not 
such fervor as our love for those who are most in- 
timately related to us, but what it lacks in fervor 
it more than gains in spiritual exaltation. God 
touches us through Christ at the highest level of 
our nature. Our human loves are evoked too fre- 
quently by qualities that are of transient worth. 
Our love for Christ is based upon the qualities of 
divine character which are as eternal as God himself. 

64 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 
Freedom in the Mind Alone 

It is in the realm of thought alone that man en- 
joys untrammelled freedom. In the outward life 
of daily deed he is hedged about on every side. 
Day and night he is driven hither and thither by 
circumstances over which he has little or no con- 
trol. On every hand and at every turn he is met 
by some constraining authority. The world stands 
guard over his outward life to regulate it. And 
regulate it the world will, by all the customs and 
conventionalities of society, by all the laws and 
precedents that time has established. In a man's 
mind alone is there any real freedom worthy the 
name. Men may put shackles upon his wrists and 
bind him with chains and even cast him into prison, 
but no power can break down the barrier of his 
will and enter the secret realm of his mind to lead 
captive his thought. We may not act in this world 
as we please ; but we all have the privilege of think- 
ing as we please. 

An Argument From History- 
There is a wealth of significance in the fact that 
men in all ages of the world have believed in the 

65 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

future life and that the best men have believed in 
it most. Nor is there any sign that the race is out- 
growing the belief. It is more deeply rooted to- 
day than ever before in the history of the world. 
He who ponders upon the past must stand amazed 
in the presence of a belief which has lived down a 
thousand generations of death. When Carlyle says 
that the study of the French Revolution saved him 
from atheism, we see that it was the conviction of 
an underlying and eternal purpose in events that 
saved him. He who reads with open eyes the his- 
tory of the world must see that there is a plan at 
its heart. According to Lord Kelvin, it took two 
hundred million years to make some of the rocks 
under our feet. And to what end? The clue is 
in the word man. In him the world process comes 
to consciousness. He embodies the meaning of it 
all. And that the meaning should be no wider 
than the span of his earthly existence is simply un- 
thinkable ! 

Friendship and Worldly Success 

Are we, any of us, making the great refusal? 
Are we making more of our comforts and worldly 
triumphs than we are making of our friendships? 

66 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

Are we putting things above people? What would 
you think of a man who held to his friends until 
some great trial came into their lives and then cut 
himself loose because longer association would mean 
that their burden must become his burden? Do 
you know people of whom it might be said, They 
have no friends, only acquaintances? And is it not 
true that they are without friends because they 
always love themselves better in emergencies than 
they love their fellows ? There are men and women 
upon whom you can never count to stand by a 
friend or to stand by a cause. In the hour of test- 
ing they will always desert their friends, not because 
they do not care for them, but because they love 
above everything else what St. Paul called " this 
present world." 

The New Patriotism 

The old patriotism was much concerned with 
guns and flags and all the paraphernalia of war. 
The new patriotism is to be a thing of schools 
and hospitals and churches and mission-halls and 
institutions for all who feel the extraordinary bur- 
dens of life. The new patriotism will concern 
itself with clean streets and well-built houses; it 

67 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

will demand that the rich be satisfied with less and 
that the poor have more; it will not be so spec- 
tacular, but it will be more real, more vitally asso- 
ciated with the raw needs of human life. The day 
of the hero on horseback is past; the day of the 
hero in the bonds of civic self-sacrifice has come. 
America has always found men ready to die for her 
on the battlefield. What she needs to-day is men who 
are willing to live for her; a great army ready to 
contend 

" For the right against the wrong, 
For the weak against the strong, 
For the poor whoVe waited long, 
For the brighter age to be." 

The Indwelling God 

The absentee God is not the God of essential 
Christianity. God is in his world, not outside of it. 
The visible order of things is a vast unfolding of the 
divine purpose. And " in him we live and move and 
have our being." The communion of the soul with 
God is not a thing spasmodic and miraculous; it is 
a rich and constant sense of personal relationship 
by which the soul rises out of the necessities of re- 
straining law into the free realm of love. We ng 

68 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

longer worship a God enthroned among the stars, 
but a God who dwells in us as a constraining spirit 
of love. Would that the church of Christ might 
reject the unworthy view of God which represents 
him as dwelling apart from his children and reveal- 
ing himself only through miracles, and accept the 
nobler view expressed in the words of Tennyson's 
" Higher Pantheism ": 

" Speak to him, thou, for he hears, 
And spirit w 7 ith spirit can meet. 
Closer is he than breathing, 

And nearer than hands and feet." 

Conventional Christianity Worldly and 
Unspiritual 

It must be admitted that in many a Christian 
church the people have no commanding sense of 
their oneness with God. They believe, to be sure, 
that such a being exists. But that he is one with 
them, the very life of their life, — how deeply rooted 
in this conviction? And how many have come to 
see that our limitations limit God, that he can do 
nothing in our human world other than in us and 
through us ? I dare not tell by what spiritual trag- 
edies I have been led to the conviction that a deal 

6 9 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

of our Conventional Christianity is worldly and un- 
spiritual. There is no burning sense of reality in it. 
The things of the spirit are not the things of su- 
preme importance. Religion is looked upon as a 
good thing, a safe thing, an altogether respectable 
thing; but that it can make people who are poor 
happy; that it can make those who are sorrowful re- 
joice; that it can take the worry and anxiety out of 
the soul; that it can be made a living, triumphant 
power in life — to what degree does conventionalized 
Christianity believe this? 

A New Reverence 

Jesus' reverence for suffering humankind was a 
new and holy thing to the world. Tender and beau- 
tiful are the words through which we perceive how 
his soul hung upon the infinite love of God. Rich 
and joyous are the expressions which reveal with 
what cords of affection he bound himself to the 
men and women on his own plane of life. We 
should deeply miss from our gospel such noble utter- 
ances as, " Having loved his own which were in the 
world, he loved them unto the end." But more 
than all, it was his reverent sympathy for the maimed 
and broken humanity far beneath him, that conquers 

70 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

the heart of the world. What was to the great 
prophet of the Exile but a far-off vision of good for 
men, Jesus exemplified in himself: 

" The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, 
Because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel 

to the poor; 
He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, 
To preach deliverance to the captives, 
And recovering of sight to the blind, 
To set at liberty them that are bruised, 
To preach the acceptable year of the Lord." 

A Wholesome Sense of Divine Justice 

I would not have men worship again the God 
of Puritanism, the Potentate of Calvinism, the hard 
King, ruling his subjects with a rod of iron; yet I 
would call upon them to remember that great as is 
the love of God there is something also to fear. The 
fear of the Lord is still the beginning of wisdom. 
Only bitterness and disaster can come to the man 
who does not and will not see that he is living under 
the authority of a divine Justice, and that he must 
bend his life to the immutable laws of righteousness. 
To conceive of God as an over-indulgent Father is 
no less an error than to conceive of him as an over- 
exacting king. As the Puritan went to one extreme, 

71 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

so is it possible for us to go to the other, and to lose 
thereby the wholesome sense of a divine justice 
which takes account of transgression and is under 
the very compulsion of love itself to punish. This 
age does not need to return to the hard theology of 
the Puritans; but it does need above all else the 
Puritan's deep and holy sense of God in his life, 
and his sense of commission to get the will of God 
done among men. 



The Star-Element in Christianity 

Christ was born into the known, but he was also 
born out of the unknown. He lay in the manger, 
but above him, luminous in the night, hung the 
star. Here, if I mistake not, we touch the secret of 
Christianity's influence over the world. Men have 
believed, and, whatever their theories of incarnation, 
will continue to believe, that the birth of Christ was 
God's answer to the heart-cry of the human before 
the mystery of the unknown. Profoundly signifi- 
cant is the phrase of scripture, " And the heavens 
were opened." It is the star-element in Christianity 
that has made it so great a power in moulding the 
world's thought and life. The religion of the New 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

Testament concerns itself with the practical affairs 
of our every-day existence; but it concerns itself 
also with the dreams and aspirations by which we 
stand related to God and immortal life. The re- 
ligion of Jesus, like a microscope, brings into strong 
relief the details of daily conduct and defines their 
importance; but, like a telescope, it also draws into 
the range of our vision the heavenly truths and 
realities which have been for so many ages the ob- 
jects of man's most searching inquiry. 



Sorrow With the Upward Look 

Sorrow should unseal the secret springs of our 
being, minister holy thoughts to the mind, and awak- 
en sacred impulses of love and loyalty in the heart. 
To behold that which was designed to lead us closer 
to God and to a larger sympathy with our fellow- 
men, shutting us up more closely to the isolation 
of self, herein is the only sadness in sorrow. This 
is the theme of Martineau's great sermon on " Sor- 
row with the Downward Look." Sorrow should 
have the outward and upward look. It is too sacred 
an experience to leave only dregs of bitterness. 
Much that passes in the world as sorrow is but an 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

unsuspecting commiseration of self. It is quite pos- 
sible to permit sorrow to become a most subtle and 
penetrating stimulant to selfishness. Does it cause 
us to forget the larger interests of the kingdom of 
God? Does it turn our eyes back to the unrecov- 
erable past, and loosen our hold on the hard and 
bare plow-handles of duty? If so, then sorrow has 
not accomplished its holy mission in our lives; we 
have not yet spelled out the secret of Jesus' human 
experience. 

A Spiritual Spectroscope 

It looks to-day as if science may yet have some- 
thing positive to say concerning the problem of the 
future life. Those who have followed the investi- 
gations of the Society for Psychical Research will 
not scoff at the suggestion that the future life may 
yet find scientific demonstration. It stands one in 
hand to be modest when predicting the limitations 
of science. So great a man as Comte learned that 
lesson. " Distant bodies/' he once wrote, " acces- 
sible to no sense but that of vision, will never admit 
of researches deserving to be called positive, in any 
other of their phenomena than extension and mo- 
tion. " It seems plain that no age is without its 

74 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

lesson of humility. Comte's prediction was followed 
by the invention of the spectroscope. Who has the 
right to predict that we may not yet discover a 
spiritual spectroscope which will demonstrate to us 
far more than we now know of the future life? 



The Appeal of the Unknown 

After the child has learned to walk, there comes 
a day when he puts his little hands on the window- 
sill, and drawing himself up on tiptoe, looks out 
upon the great world. The long search into the 
alluring mystery has begun. It will never end, at 
least in this life. The spell of the unknown is over 
every child of earth and renews its appeal from age 
to age. In the Book it is written that the Lord 
drove Adam out of the garden; and he drove him 
out doubtless by means of an instinct deeply im- 
planted in Adam's own nature. There is something 
in the soul of a man that will not let him rest in a 
garden. The great spaces of the unexplored world 
call him to go, and go he must. It is the appeal 
of the unknown that leads the explorer over bois- 
terous seas and through dense forests and up the 
steep places of high mountains. It is the appeal of 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

the unknown that leads philosopher and poet and 
prophet from truth to truth and from vision to 
vision. The dying cry of the great German, 
" More light," is the cry that bursts out of the soul 
of the race. 



Distinction Between Faith and Belief 

Religious faith is a thing quite different from 
theological belief. Religious faith is the free move- 
ment of a man's moral nature; dogma at its best 
is only an intellectual exercise. It was a tragic 
mistake the church made when it changed the mean- 
ing of faith from the spontaneous impulse of the 
loving heart to a verbal or mental assent to cer- 
tain doctrinal statements. No word in our language 
has been so abused as this word " faith." As used 
in the classic Greek by Plato in his discussions of 
the lower forms of knowledge, the word meant 
an act of the mind; and occasionally it has this 
meaning in the Bible. But Christ used the word 
in a very different sense. With him faith was a 
free act of the heart. Christ told the woman who 
was a sinner that her faith had saved her, and we 
know that this faith spoken of by him had no theo- 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

logical background; it was the simple outgoing of 
her heart and will to him who drew her with a 
mighty love. To see him, to desire him, and to 
take him, so far as may be possible, into our hearts — 
this is faith, and this is the power that saves. 

The Modern City a Sad Sight 

Jesus wept as he looked over Jerusalem. What 
would be his feeling were he to look down upon 
our city to-day? Unquestionably he would see 
many things to gladden his eye, — wide streets, open 
squares, beautiful houses, majestic public buildings, 
temples of worship, great halls of learning. Ours 
is a city stately in outward aspect, a city which 
any citizen may take pride in calling his own. No, 
it would not be the surface view of things that 
would sadden the heart of Jesus, it would be the 
things hidden in the city's life. In the midst of 
all the strength and genius and splendor of a great 
city, what tragedy lurks, what suffering, poverty, 
injustice, what wickedness and crime and bitter 
shame ! Where is the large city in our land to-day 
that is not a sad sight, sad beyond all words to ex- 
press to him who looks deeper than wood and brick 
and stone ? 

77 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 
In the Days That Were 

If you could go back to-morrow to the old home, 
to the old school-ground, to some old spot that 
recalled a past experience, would your heart leap 
with joy or droop in sorrow? Are there not some 
of us who would weep at the thought that we 
were nobler boys than we are men, that we were 
purer girls than we are women? Has life been to 
us a process of disillusionment? Have we grown 
cynical rather than sympathetic ? Are we priding 
ourselves on being worldly wise? Have we struck 
a balance between the call of Christ and the claims 
of mammon ? Are we congratulating ourselves that 
we can construe Christianity to favor our worldly 
interests? Are we such men and women that a 
great-heart like Paul could find no possible use for 
us in the work of advancing Christ's kingdom? If 
so, let us slough off the whole wretched make- 
believe and give our souls a chance. 

An Inexorable Law 

Woe betide the man whose horizon is no wider 
than the circle of his own self-interest. He who 
isolates himself from his fellowmen, he who re- 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

fuses to devote his energies to anything greater than 
his own personal welfare, he who says within his 
heart, what are personal friendships and loyalties 
to me, what do I care about the great causes of 
which you talk; I will live by myself, I will lux- 
uriate at home, I will take my fill of the good things 
of life; why should I make a slave of myself for 
others, why should I deny myself that others may 
find enjoyment ; the man who so reasons and so con- 
ducts himself will find all the fresh fountains of 
life running dry within him and the whole landscape 
of his inner life becoming a sear and withered thing. 
It is worse than childish for a man to think that 
he can find life, health of soul, fulness of joy, ex- 
cept on the terms which the eternal God has 
wrought into the very structure of his being. 



The World a Temple of Worship 

Many people fall into a way of thinking that 
they must depreciate nature in order to enhance the 
worth of the Bible. This is a great mistake. Sci- 
ence, in so far as it opens to us the secrets of na- 
ture's abounding life, is not adverse to, but rather 
coincident with, the Scriptural revelation of God 

79 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

in his world. The material creation is for a nobler 
purpose than the mere gratification of physical 
wants; it is shot through and through with spir- 
itual values. The glory and wisdom of God are 
seen by the things which are made. The overarch- 
ing sky is an appeal to the instinct of worship. Both 
Scripture and science teach us that God dwells with- 
in his world rather than outside of it; and since 
there cannot be two Holy Spirits, it follows that 
the Father who dwells within the soul is the same 
Father who dwells within the world. As the Scrip- 
tural interpretation of man gives him a new dig- 
nity and worth, so the religious interpretation of 
nature invests it with a new sacredness and glory. 



Kindness 

To be a Christian is to be kind, — kind to old 
people and to little children, kind to the cattle and 
the horses and all creatures, whether man or beast, 
that appeal to us out of some dumb agony of need. 
The kindness that is Christian is not forced from 
without, but is a kindness that wells up out of deep 
fountains of pity within. " Be pitiful," says one 
of the apostles, " be pitiful," be full of pity. It was 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

not an appeal to sentiment alone; it was an appeal 
to the deep law of things. Pity is the great unify- 
ing force of the world. It is the very essence of the 
divine character. " It is the tenderness of eternal 
love," writes one, " that binds God to his crea- 
tures. It is the tenderness of human love, wise, 
strong, and pitiful, that binds men together. And 
it is out of such sympathy only that peace is born 
for community or nation." A deeper and warmer 
sympathy is surely your need and mine; and where 
shall we go to find it if not to him who was so 
profoundly " moved with compassion " for all that 
lived and breathed? 



The Springtide of the Soul 

Christianity is not a philosophy or a system of 
doctrine, but a fullness of life. " Of his fullness," 
said John, " we all received, and grace for grace." 
Jesus of Nazareth was a great teacher, it is true, but 
his primary purpose was the impartation of life. 
We have his own avowal: " I am come that they 
might have life, and that they might have it more 
abundantly." Jesus saw how great was the spiritual 
capacity of seemingly unspiritual people, and his 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

aim was to put them in full possession of their hu- 
man nature. His ministry was a quickening, in- 
spiring power that called out all latent possibilities 
of character. The barren branch is clothed with 
leaves, the gnarled bulb is transformed into a fra- 
grant flower, birds sing again in the silent woods, 
and out of deep shadows comes the blending of fair 
colors, — all because the sun has shone. Christ is a 
sun shining upon the bare mass of human nature. 
Men and women see him face to face and, behold, 
a new springtide floods their lives. 

Realities that Lie Too Deep for Words 

The painter strives in vain to put on canvas the 
picture that is in his soul. The teacher spends a life- 
time attempting to impart literally the truth which 
can only be suggested. The matter-of-fact Occi- 
dent is prone to think it can capture truth by words 
or hold her captive in the chains of the syllogism. 
The peoples of the Orient are wiser. They know 
that a glowing star is nearer the reality of things 
than a dead word. Hence it is that the Bible has 
so little reasoning or argument ; the pages glow and 
burn with the imagery of perennially beautiful 
things, — the flowers under our feet, the streams rip- 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

pling to the great waters, the lights and shadows on 
the hilltops, the awful mystery of night creeping 
down the valleys, and the star hanging luminous 
far above some distant peak. These things speak 
to us of immortality and of God; they are the ex- 
ternal symbols for intuitions that lie too deep for 
words, the vernacular of the soul whereby " deep 
calleth unto deep." 

The Land of Warmth and Light 

The wild birds take their flight to the land of 
warmth and light. As their wings beat the air an 
unseen power bears them up and marks their long 
journey. Whence came we; whither are we going? 
Does the power that guides their flight know the 
way that we have taken? Will he not bring our 
souls into some high realm of warmth and light? 
The answer rises unbidden from the depths of our 
being. Something moves within us ; a longing to go 
back to that from whence we came, to quench our 
thirst at the fountain of eternal being, to drink from 
the well of everlasting life. In certain great and 
sacred moments we know ourselves, we know God, 
we know that we were created for him, and that 
our hearts are full of disquiet until they have found 

83 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

their rest in his love. What is this insatiable long- 
ing but the stirring of associations which carry us 
back to our eternal home and to the God who sent 
us on the long way, that chastened by our pilgrim- 
age he might bring us back to himself forever. 

Indignation Without Love 

A burning indignation is a magnificent thing. 
To cry out against a city if the need arise, to 
rebuke sin in high places, to denounce wickedness 
and wicked men, these are protests for which the 
world will call until the end of time. But there 
comes a moment when indignation should melt into 
pity. The prophet or reformer who deeply and 
truly ministers to his generation is one who loves 
the people more than he hates their sins. The failure 
of many reformers is attributable to the fact that 
they would rather destroy the city, rather level in 
ruins the whole existing order of things, than have 
their denunciations miscarry. Such for instance is 
the spirit of the man who deplores the national 
prosperity because it makes his particular appeal 
the less effective. A hatred of everything wrong 
and unjust is a noble passion; but to rise to the 
temper of mind and spirit that leads one to rejoice 

8 4 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

more in the penitence of the sinner than in his de- 
struction, is a passion far nobler. It is a dangerous 
thing for a man to accustom his lips to denuncia- 
tion, even against wickedness, until he feels within 
his heart the love of God for men. 

Our Love for the World 

And why not love the world? Is it not fair to 
look upon? Is it not full of things that minister 
to our joy? Why, pray, are we not to love this 
world of sea and earth and sky, of changing lights 
and shadows, of glorious days and nights of solemn 
beauty, this world wherein God has placed all things 
that the heart can desire, from the first common ap- 
petencies to the most refined pleasures of music and 
poetry? If we do not take delight in these things 
there is something wrong with us. God made the 
world to be loved, and us to love the world; but 
above all things else he made us to love one another, 
and in loving one another to find him, the eternal 
beauty, the eternal reality. We should love the 
world, but not be overborne by it; we should love 
it understanding that the world and all in it passes 
away and only the soul of man with its vibrant 
power of love — this only remains forever. 

85 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 
Heroes of Yesterday 

Nowhere is the wisdom of Jesus more manifest 
than in his treatment of the past. " Before Abra- 
ham was I am," said Jesus. He was the interpreter 
and justifier of the past. His doctrines were not 
new, they were old ; as old as history. He gave the 
old teaching a new and spiritual significance. He 
felt the power of yesterday in the making of to-day, 
and the ability of to-day to see clearly into yesterday. 
An appreciation of all this will save us from ill- 
judged attacks on the past and on men of the past. 
Doubtless Luther and Calvin and Knox were not 
saints, but are we saints ourselves? If Christ could 
commend Moses, ought we feel ashamed to speak a 
good word for Martin Luther and John Knox, even 
though some of their doctrines shock us? A true 
man w 7 ill avail himself of the riches of the past from 
which he came, and leave to others the task of 
throwing stones. 

As to Belief in Demons 

We have a better psychology than Jesus' day had, 
but human nature is still the same. Men are still 
possessed by demons and casting them out is still the 

86 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

world's most difficult task. Demons of ignorance 
and superstition and blind prejudice, demons of 
greed and lust and envy, demons that tyrannize over 
every power of the mind and every passion of the 
heart, demons disguised and undisguised, demons 
that we hate and demons that we love, — these all 
hold carnival, though we may not see them with the 
naked eye. No; I do not believe in the devil por- 
trayed in old paintings, but I do believe in a thou- 
sand demons that cannot be pictured. Some of them 
I have known too intimately, and with others I 
have had but a passing acquaintance. Every man 
has his own individual collection of demons, or 
perhaps I should say, his own inheritance; for many 
are demons that our parents, and their parents, 
knew. Most of them are so disguised that we 
never come to a full recognition of their real na- 
ture. Occasionally we recognize a devil as vividly 
as Luther did when he threw the ink-pot. But rec- 
ognized or unrecognized, demons innumerable still 
beset us, and to overcome them requires a heroism 
beside which the clash of war is only child's play. 



87 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 



Over Against His Own House 

No organization can serve as a substitute for 
individual activity. In religion we are expecting 
the church to do the things that must be done 
by the individual Christian. In civic reform we 
are expecting the committee or the league or the 
union to do the things that must be done by the 
individual citizen. Let us have a union of forces, 
let us have one plan, but let us not make the mis- 
take of thinking that we are thus relieved from in- 
dividual responsibility. There is an utterance appo- 
site to this in the Bible ; it is in the account of Nehe- 
miah's building the walls of Jerusalem. " The 
priests repaired," are the words, " every one over 
against his house" In just that spot where the man 
lived he went to work. Just opposite his own door 
was a break in the wall; that was the place for 
him to build up. The place for every man to build 
is the place opposite his own door. The man to 
help is the man who stands at your elbow. It is 
better to do a small work in a large way, than 
attempt a large work in a small way. If every 
man would do his own bit of work, mend the 
broken wall where it faces him in every-day life, we 

88 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

should find a shorter road to the happy secret of 
social progress. God's way of changing the world 
is a plain, old-fashioned way — soul working upon 
soul. 

The Revival Needed To-day 

The revival needed to-day is one of social 
righteousness. The feeling of brotherhood which 
is stirring all hearts is a prophecy of this revival. 
Men will continue to save their own souls, but 
they will do this by working with one another to 
the great end of social regeneration. Individual 
work for individuals will continue to hold its place 
in our plan of church economy, but it will not be 
forgotten that the great end of all such effort is 
the kingdom of heaven on earth, a society in which 
righteousness dwells. People will need to accept 
Christ as a Saviour to-morrow as fully as they 
needed to accept* him yesterday, but they will un- 
derstand as never before that the Saviourhood of 
Christ means service to humanity. The movement 
towards social reformation will not destroy indi- 
vidualism. It will lift it up and clothe it with 
garments of light and glorify it with a diviner 
meaning. The revival of to-morrow will begin in 

8 9 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

personal salvation, but it will not end there. The 
church needs to deepen its spiritual life, but this 
can best be done through social service. It would 
seem from present indications that we are on the 
verge of a revival such as the world has never 
known. Minds are planning for it; hearts are 
hungry for it. There is a spirit of expectancy 
abroad in the world, and again people are asking 
the old question, " What shall we do?" 

Shall We Continue to Use the Word 
God? 

At one time it seemed as if science would leave 
no place for God. " Nowadays," said Comte the 
philosopher, " the heavens declare no other glory 
than that of Hipparchus, Newton, Kepler, and the 
rest who have found out the laws of their se- 
quence." " The reign of law " became the centre 
of scientific discussion. Many imagined everything 
explained when the world was asserted to be the 
outcome of law. But it is now generally admitted 
that the term " law of nature," far from explaining 
anything, is merely a statement of the facts for which 
we endeavor to account. What we call the laws 
of nature are the methods by which an immanent 

90 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

power, indefinable and vast, expresses itself. That 
power we call God. The word is as necessary to 
our speech to-day as it ever was ; and the reality for 
w T hich it stands is as necessary to our thought as 
ever; more necessary, in fact; for our deeper inves- 
tigations have made clearer the rationality of the 
universe and revealed the divine purpose that throbs 
in all created things. Our definitions of God have 
been shaken down into nothingness, but the great 
vital fact, referred to by one of the world's pro- 
foundest thinkers as " the presence of an infinite 
and eternal energy from which all things proceed/' 
is a fact that underlies all others and is forever 
unshakable. 

The Truth about the Bible 

I would that w T e might have a church intellect- 
ually eager, made up of men and women who found 
it utterly impossible to content themselves with any 
less truth than they were capable of attaining, men 
and women who were as keen to have their min- 
ister proclaim a new truth of religion as a uni- 
versity is to have one of its scholars proclaim a 
new fact in science. Perhaps I am wrong, but there 
is, it seems to me, a feeling abroad in the com- 

91 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

munity that the church is not declaring a full mes- 
sage; that our theologians and preachers are not 
telling all they know about the Bible; that they 
are afraid the people are not ready for the whole 
truth. Is it a fact that such a feeling really exists? 
If it does, then let us set ourselves deliberately to 
change it by being men and women of a bolder 
courage and a loftier purpose. There is no road 
known to God that we can walk with so great 
safety as the road of truth. There is no higher 
service the church can render to men than to lead 
them along truth's shining way. 

" Anew we pledge ourselves to Thee, 

To follow where Thy Truth shall lead : 
Afloat upon its boundless sea, 

Who sails with God is safe indeed. " 

Eternal Life a Present Reality 

It was the teaching of Jesus that the eternal life 
begins in this world. We are not going to enter 
eternity; we are in eternity now. Christ was as 
immortal on the cross as when he had risen to the 
right hand of the Father. The life of to-day and 
the life of to-morrow, — it is all one life. Do you 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

recall that utterance of Saint Paul: " If by any 
means I might attain unto the resurrection of the 
dead." Here the resurrection is presented to us, 
not as a remote truth, something to be experienced 
in a distant future, but as a rising in this present 
existence to the reality of the life of God. Cease 
asking the question, Am I going to rise from the 
dead after I die? The only question that should 
concern us is simply this: Have I risen from the 
dead to-day? The eternal life is not something far 
away beyond the stars; it is something here, a quick- 
ening spirit in the soul. You must come to your 
faith in the immortal life by some other way than 
through the study of history, or philosophy, or sci- 
ence; you must come to it by the vitalizing power 
of that life itself in your soul. What we need is 
not more argument, but a more Christ-like experi- 
ence of life. If we are to believe in immortality, 
we must feel the tides of immortal life flooding 
within us. 

Why the Priests Hated Jesus 

Need we wonder that the priests of Jesus' day 
hated him? If his idea of religion should prevail, 
what would become of the temple and the altar 

93 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

and the ritual? The priests had labored to make 
the people believe that religion consisted in sacrifices 
and forms and prayers, that there were no sacred 
places except those in which they, the priests, re- 
ceived the offerings of the faithful. Behold, now, 
this teacher of strange doctrines setting forth reli- 
gion as a thing of deeds of mercy and heart-throbs 
of sympathy, and the religious man as he who 
preached to the poor, healed the broken-hearted, 
delivered the captives, helped the blind to see, and 
liberated those who were bruised and in bondage 
to evil passions. Is it any wonder they were en- 
raged at the story in which the Samaritan was 
lifted into contrast with the priest w T ho passed by 
on the other side? If you would please God, was 
Jesus' message to them, you must minister to the 
sick, you must feed the hungry, you must seek jus- 
tice, you must render mercy, you must pity the un- 
fortunate, you must forgive your enemies, you must 
act at all times and in all situations as if the men 
in the world about you were your brothers; the 
only pleasing and acceptable service you can render 
your heavenly Father is to minister to those who 
stand in need. 



94 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 
Self-interest or Benevolence? 

Gradually men are coming to understand that 
the kingdom of God is not some scheme Jesus orig- 
inated. It is that social order towards which all 
things have tended from the very beginning. We 
are coming to see that the law of love is not a law 
which hangs upon the authoritative utterance of 
Jesus, but that he cast this law into verbal form 
because he saw it was wrought into the very nature 
of things. There was a kingdom of God growing 
up in the world before Jesus came, and the law of 
that kingdom was the law of love. Only in the 
measure that the law of love has held sway over 
the lives of men has social progress been possible. 
This law of love is to the moral world what grav- 
itation is to the physical world. The most prim- 
itive forms of society would be impossible without 
the exercise of that law. And if it were true, as 
the old economists affirmed, that God had made self- 
interest a stronger passion than benevolence, that 
which we call civilization would have been a thing 
utterly impossible on the earth. Even without Chris- 
tianity the world must have come at last to the 
realization of the kingdom of God ; for the seeds of 

95 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

the kingdom are in the soul of the race, and the 
law of the kingdom is wrought into the very fibre 
of man's being. 

A Return to Puritanism 

The world needs to-day, and the church should 
set itself to bring about, a return to Puritanism. 
I do not mean a return to the Puritan theology or 
the Puritan way of life. I mean a return to their 
ideals, a return to their faithfulness to conscience, 
a return to their simplicity and moral earnestness. 
Nor am I without hope that such a return to Pur- 
itanism will come. The situation to-day would 
be utterly discouraging were it not that so many 
men, in and out of the church, are praying and 
working for an ethical revival. Nobody wants to 
restore the Puritan theology, but there are tens of 
thousands who long to see society get back to the 
old unswerving fidelity to truth, to the old intel- 
lectual thoroughness, to the old passion to hew 
down to the realities of life, to the old sense of 
God and our obligations to him. This is what I 
mean by a return to Puritanism. We can afford 
to put aside with solemn respect the theology of 
our fathers, we can afford to discard their man- 

9 6 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

ners, to smile at their little idiosyncrasies of speech 
and dress; but the thing we cannot afford to put 
aside is their moral sense, their stern adherence to 
the law of things. 

The Soul's Crucible 

We should not allow ourselves to be fright- 
ened by any high and mighty utterances concerning 
the " unknowableness of God." Behind us are too 
many centuries of Christian faith and martyrdom. 
That God lives is a conviction of the church which 
has been forged in a furnace seven times hotter than 
that in which the three worthies of Israel walked 
unharmed. One heart-broken creature's positive as- 
surance of God as a living power in his life, is worth 
more than the negative evidence of any number of 
those who, not conscious of having so found him, 
deny the possibility to others. What of the testi- 
mony of a thousand men who are blind to it! My 
own experience satisfies me of God and the essen- 
tial truths of the religion of Jesus. I believe that 
other men come to a full and satisfying assurance 
of those truths only through experience. We must 
lay hold of Christianity's great assumptions, if you 
choose to call them such, and test them in the soul's 

97 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

crucible. The truths of the Christian religion are 
such as may be proved, but not by standing out- 
side of them. They are — 

" The truths that never can be proved 
Until we close with all we loved 
And all we flow from, soul to soul." 

A Lesson Unlearned 

It is startling to consider how little men change 
from age to age. Since Jesus preached, many intel- 
lectual battles have been fought, many systems of 
theology have come and gone; nevertheless, I ven- 
ture to affirm that the great mass of men and women 
are still under the tyranny of false ideas in religion. 
Prophets have interpreted the will of God, seers 
have set forth in glowing speech the things re- 
vealed to them in visions, martyrs have suffered 
and died, every new generation has witnessed the 
heroic endeavor of the few to instruct the many in 
that simplest and hardest of all lessons to learn — 
what constitutes a truly religious life. And yet I 
sometimes wonder whether the world, whether the 
church itself, is not as far from having learned the 
lesson as in the days of old. If Christ were here 

9 8 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

at the present time, would his word to Christian 
people be other than the old word uttered in Pal- 
estine, " Whereunto shall I liken the men of this 
generation? And to what are they like? They 
are like unto children sitting in the market-place, 
and calling one to another, and saying, We have 
piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have 
mourned to you, and ye have not wept." 

What All Men Desire 

The universal desire is for something that shall 
go deeper than the conventional and academic 
processes of the trained intellect, for some revela- 
tion of power and beauty that shall touch the heart. 
The most patent of all facts concerning man is 
the fact that he is a man, a man long before he is 
a wholly civilized man. We all know that we are 
doing our work in harness of a thousand genera- 
tions' making. Our lives are set in a tangle of re- 
lationships and conventions which we cannot easily 
escape. Constantly we are being reminded of laws 
and obligations by which we are interknitted into 
a common order of things. We give ourselves 
freely, and sometimes, I fear, too earnestly, to this 
complex life. In greater or lesser degree, however, 

LOFC* 99 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

all men and women have the desire to get back to 
that which is fundamental and simple; to emphasize 
that which we ourselves are, apart from all that 
our civilization has made us. The feelings and ex- 
periences lying deeper than the artificial joys that 
come through a complex and sophisticated state of 
society ; the sentiments that are common to all alike ; 
the thoughts and aspirations that are native to 
every man of whatever nationality; — these are the 
instinctive, essential outgrowings of life. 

Back to the Cross 

In our reaction against theories of the atone- 
ment we have lost out of life the sense of a love 
so divine that it gave itself to the uttermost. The 
cross is the glorious symbol of our faith. The church 
of this age will never get hold of the gospel anew 
until it goes back to the cross. Let it go back with 
better theories if it can, but back it must go, and 
stand with aching heart and streaming eyes as it 
looks upon the mystery of suffering love. Preach 
the cross to men, not the cross of wood, not the 
cross of theological theory, but the cross of sacri- 
ficing love. The church should keep before the 
world the story of him who loved men better than 

IOO 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

he loved himself, of him who longed with the strong 
desire of his pure soul for the coming of God's 
kingdom, of him who saw with divine clearness the 
law of the kingdom and voiced it in language that 
should burn in the Christian consciousness like a 
flame of fire: " And I, if I be lifted up from the 
earth, will draw all men unto me." We are to 
preach this gospel to the world; and if we would 
meet the need of the age it behooves us to take to 
our hearts the gospel's large implication. " As I 
have loved you," is not complete without the words, 
" Love ye also one another." 

A Wise and an Unwise Agnosticism 

There is something deeply ignoble in a man's 
turning away from the appeal of the unknown. 
Hard-headed, matter-of-fact men may continue to 
say that they are fools who throw away their lives 
in the well-nigh hopeless attempt to reach the North 
Pole; but there will always be other men to whom 
it would seem a thing unheroic and shameful did 
the generations not bring forth sturdy adven- 
turers ready to give their lives to penetrate the 
mystery of the silent Northland. And if it is un- 
heroic to turn away from the unknown in the 

IOI 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

exploration of the earth, how much more unheroic 
to turn away from the appeal made by the un- 
known spiritual reality. There is in the world a 
certain wise agnosticism, the agnosticism which is 
a reaction from the claims of philosophers and the- 
ologians who think all spiritual questions have been 
answered, all problems solved, all mysteries fath- 
omed. With such an agnosticism all must sympa- 
thize. But there is another agnosticism that simply 
denies, that shuts its eyes and will not look, that 
deliberately turns away from the appeal of the un- 
known — an agnosticism that folds its hands and sits 
down to doubt and despair. 

We Too Would Have Loved Him 

It is easy to understand how those who knew 
Jesus loved him as they did. There was so much 
truth and purity in his character, such a blending 
of strength and tenderness, that it led captive the 
affections of all who intimately knew him. In his 
presence life took on large new meanings. In his 
presence Zaccheus discovered how low and worth- 
less w T ere his ambitions of worldly gain. In his 
presence the woman that was a sinner wept and 
covered her face in shame. In his presence the cold, 

1 02 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

calculating Thomas said, " Let us also go, that we 
may die with him." Impetuous Peter swore a great 
oath that he would die rather than forsake him. 
John leaned upon his bosom in the familiar devo- 
tion characteristic of that age and people. Men 
and women, everywhere and among all classes, rich 
and poor, learned and unlearned, gave him their 
hearts, and found in their love for him a new 
passion, a new purpose, a new joy. And as we read 
the story of that life, we cannot wonder at the 
response. We too would have been drawn to him 
had we lived in that day; we too would have given 
him our hearts; we too would have loved him. 

Singleness of Purpose 

We all have nobler hours, hours when we feel 
deeply the appeal of the higher life. We know that 
Christ's way of living is the true way. We are 
ashamed of our selfishness, and determine upon a 
new and higher course of life. We put our hands 
to the plow with enthusiastic resolve. And then 
we begin to discover the profound significance of 
those words, " Foxes have holes, and birds of the 
air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where 
to lay his head." We find that the interests of 

103 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 



the worldly and natural life conflict with those of 
the spiritual life. Our single purpose breaks into 
parts. We strive at the same time to live for 
ourselves and for others. We look forward and 
then look back. The soil is stony and hard; the 
constant attention to the plow exhausts us. The 
harvest is a long way off, and we are weary of toil. 
We look then to the life of lower experiences and 
they invite us to the self-indulgence of the present 
hour. We waver; our hands lose their grip on 
the plow; we turn back from the hard way of self- 
denial, and the old heroic dreams depart from us. 

How Men Became Christians in Jesus' 
Time 

The great religious struggle of this century is 
a struggle to get back to the simplicity that is in 
Christ. Becoming a Christian in Christ's time 
meant simply personal trust in a personal Christ. 
It should mean nothing else to-day. There were 
but two things necessary in Christ's day to become 
a Christian. The first was the recognition of Jesus 
as Lord. Unless he was worthy to be followed, 
why should they follow him? Unless he had a 
claim on their allegiance, why should they be loyal 

104 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

to him? Unless he could make them better men 
and open up to them a new life, why should they 
leave their nets upon the shore? A recognition of 
Jesus as their Lord and Master, that was the first 
requirement. And what was the second? Read 
the classic passage from the New Testament: " And 
walking by the Sea of Galilee he saw two breth- 
ren, Simon who is called Peter, and Andrew his 
brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were 
fishers. And he said unto them, Come ye after me, 
and I will make you fishers of men. And they 
straightway left their nets and followed him." 

As to Saving Our Own Souls 

We are to remember that our country is a wide 
expanse of fertile fields and vast forests, of rivers 
that wind hundreds of miles to the sea and lakes 
that are inland oceans. We are to remember how 
various are the peoples that inhabit our land and 
how many and strange the cities that we have never 
seen. Only here and there is a man large enough 
to work on a national scale. Most of us must 
work in the little circumscribed place where God 
has put us. Our only way to help on the salvation 
of the country is to help on the salvation of the city, 

105 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

or to help on the salvation of the ward, or even 
the salvation of a single street. But this much 
should be understood: We are no Christians if we 
stop at the saving our own souls. Christ never 
saved a man just for the sake of getting him saved. 
He saved him for a purpose. He had a work for 
him. He always gave a man to understand that 
his salvation meant aught to God only as he got 
hold of the lever of some cause which had to do with 
the establishment of the kingdom of heaven on 
earth, only as he got hold of the lever and threw 
his weight upon it. 

The Moral Life for Its Own Sake 

I am not an adherent of the Christian faith be- 
cause it is the only way I can save my soul. 
Frankly, I believe there are other ways; or rather, 
that there are other faiths by which men find the 
royal road that leads to the summit. Everywhere 
and in all ages, in places where the Christian teach- 
ing is unknown and among strange peoples who 
never heard of Christ, men have succeeded and are 
succeeding in saving themselves. Nor do I glory 
in calling myself a Christian because the Chris- 
tian religion fills my soul with a power that helps 

1 06 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

me to lead a moral life. I do not overlook the 
ethical significance of the gospel of Jesus Christ; 
I am simply affirming myself to be of those who 
do not find their chief motive for allegiance to 
Christ in any moral considerations. If to-day I 
utterly lost my faith in the Christian religion, I 
do not know that I should care to change my course 
of conduct to-morrow. I believe there are thousands 
who would live the moral life for its own sake. 
Take God and immortality out of their thoughts, 
and, irrational as it might seem, they would still 
cling to their ideals of moral rectitude. 

If Jesus Were Here 

If Jesus were here in the w 7 orld to-day, the few 
who have made themselves strong out of the weak- 
ness of the many, those who have broken the laws 
and practiced extortion and bribery, those who have 
robbed the poor by trading upon public privileges 
for private gain, those who have bought and sold 
lawmakers and officials set to administer laws, the 
men who have openly defied every state and federal 
authority and prostituted the institutions on which 
free government rests — those men, if Jesus were here 
in the world, would find a great gulf fixed between 

107 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

him and them. They would find it utterly im- 
possible to get into any sort of alliance with him 
until they had come, as penitent Zaccheus came, 
making public confession of their guilt and offering 
full restitution. If Jesus did not take that stand, 
then would he be untrue to everything he stood for 
in Palestine; he would violate the whole spirit of 
his former ministry. He would no longer be the 
great Protestant. The plain people who have been 
wronged would turn from him to find a higher ethic 
in some other place. 

The Shame of the Church 

The Church of to-day stands in need of more 
intellectual enthusiasm. Men are strenuous to 
make every other form of enlightenment prevail. 
No sooner is a truth of science discovered than 
thousands are crying it from the housetops. But 
let some one discover a new fact about the Bible, 
and lo! he must speak in hushed whispers. This is 
the burning shame of the Church. We are cowards 
if we yield to it. God has given us, in this age, new 
ideas concerning our human and divine relation- 
ship and the obligations springing therefrom. We 
know that this new enlightenment is transforming, 

1 08 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

rationalizing, beautifying our religion. Let us be 
true to that knowledge. Let us not shrink from 
any burden of responsibility. We may make ex- 
cuses for withdrawing from the contest, for rest- 
ing upon our arms, but God will look through our 
excuses and see that we are cowards. Some other 
church will be obliged to do the work for which 
the hour calls, and we be left with nothing but 
the consciousness that we have betrayed the cause 
of enlightenment. Has God given us exceptional 
opportunities? Then he holds us, and men hold us, 
exceptionally responsible for them. 

Between Earth and Sky- 
Religion is becoming so much a thing of deed, 
of what the hand actually does, that we are in 
danger of neglecting those aspects of it which are 
born of the imagination. I do not mean that we 
should forget the solid earth under our feet, but 
I do mean that we should be more conscious of 
the poetry and romance of life. In the middle ages, 
it is true, men fancied that religion was for the 
other world alone. But are we not in danger of 
making it too exclusively a thing of this world? 
It is for both worlds, the life that we now live, 

109 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

and the life that is to come. " Jesus knowing . . . 
that he came forth from God, and goeth unto God 
. . . took a towel, and girded himself." Here is a 
ray from the gospel narrative that throws light on 
my meaning. Though the unknown had voiced it- 
self to Jesus, though he had such a deep sense of 
God and of the eternal life into which he was 
going, yet the towel was a sacred thing to him; 
not sacred in itself, but sacred as an instrument by 
which to minister to humanity. No man ever uses 
the homely things of life as they ought to be used, 
unless he has in his soul a deep sense of those spir- 
itual realities which give a divine meaning to com- 
mon things and common experiences. 

Life Has a Meaning 

Christ is my master because he looked deep enough 
into the soul to see that it could be satisfied by 
nothing less than a star. Other teachers do not 
hold me; they seem to have only passing glimpses 
of the awful heights and depths of human life. 
His word is strong and sweet and satisfying — " I 
will give him the morning star." There is no such 
joy as the joy of laboring in full faith that this 
promise is not an empty utterance; that what we 

IIO 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

have longed for we shall attain, that what we have 
fought for we shall achieve. By this promise we 
may steady ourselves for every swift and stern en- 
counter; we may trust where we cannot see, and 
hope where all is darkness; we may climb up and 
up, while over us sweeps the storm, and our feet 
are tangled in the wreckage of high-born ambi- 
tions; we may somehow shape out of the bound- 
less tumult of contending forces this message of 
peace — Life has a meaning, it all has a meaning. 
Fight on as others have fought before you. Hope 
and dream and plan some high endeavor. The cup 
must some day be pressed to your lips. Drink it 
as one who dares every test of life, as one who be- 
lieves in the future, as one who sees the star, and, 
though he may not know what daring adventure 
it calls him to, goes forward with a cheer. 

Private Property a Trust 

We as a people are coming to a recognition of the 
principle that wealth is a trust, not a possession. 
This is a judgment which is emerging from the com- 
plicated struggle of our modern democracy; and 
under it private fortunes will some day become the 
reserve fund of society. The idea of private prop- 

III 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

erty as a trust is already molding much of our leg- 
islation. What is an inheritance tax but a frank 
recognition of the fact that the people, through the 
state, have a certain claim upon every private for- 
tune? Public opinion is crystallizing very rapidly. 
The day is at hand when he who regards his for- 
tune as his own to be used by himself as he will, 
when he who refuses to recognize the principle 
that a fortune is a trust to be administered by him 
in the interests of the community, the day is not 
far distant when such a man will be held in gen- 
eral contempt. To-day he is secretly despised; to- 
morrow he will be openly ridiculed; the day after 
he will be obliged to reckon with the people whose 
soiled hands created every dollar of his wealth, 
however he may have come into possession of it. 

Were I to Write a Creed 

Now that we have enlarged our conception of 
religion until it covers all the facts of human life, 
it would seem that nothing is of so little worth 
as to merit neglect. I find no statements in the 
creeds about the homely facts of our physical life, 
the work we are set to do in the world, and the 
diligence with which we should prosecute the most 

112 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

ordinary tasks. Has not the time come to recog- 
nize the spiritual value of labor, and to admit that 
no man can be wholly irreligious who does his work 
faithfully and well? And even the play of life, 
what we speak of as our physical joys, the delights 
of hospitality, the sweet indulgences of family asso- 
ciations, even these have a religious value, if we do 
not violate the laws of simplicity. Were I to write 
a creed I would have it say something of the dig- 
nity and spiritual worth of labor, something of the 
joys of home life and hospitality, something of the 
open-air ministries to health concerning which we 
hear so little in the pulpit, something of the old 
simplicities which our fathers loved, never dream- 
ing that their children would give away their hearts 
to the shameful follies of luxury and gross indul- 
gence. My creed would begin with things that are 
of the earth, earthy, and affirm that even the soil 
under our feet is immanent with God. 

The High Uses of Adversity 

It cannot be too much emphasized that the sig- 
nificant thing in a man's life is the purpose which 
animates him and the inspirations by which that 
purpose is buoyed up. David was more of a man 

113 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

in the cave of Adullam than when he lived luxuri- 
ously in the palace of Saul. Adversity had strength- 
ened his purpose, defeat had tempered his soul, the 
cave of Adullam had called out the spiritual re- 
sources of his nature. A heroic course of life had 
discovered to him the deeper springs of his being, 
awakened those tender feelings by which his soul 
was held in association with all that he had known 
of home and mother-land and God ; but it had also 
toughened his moral fibre. Experience nobly met 
is the great teacher. Either in the realm without, 
or in the realm within, or in both, you must fight 
as others have fought. You must bear defeat, must 
witness the overthrow of cherished hopes, must with- 
stand temptations, must contend with the enemy, 
even though it seems a hopeless strife, and knowing 
your weakness you may at times be forced to hide 
as did David in the cave of Adullam. It is the 
common lot, the age-long strife known to all men. 
It is God's way. To miss the strain and tug of 
life's contest is to miss a man's opportunity, and to 
render any high achievement of character forever 
impossible. 



114 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 
Jesus and the Greek Ideals 

Jesus could not have been unacquainted with 
Greek customs and manners, Greek art and ideal- 
ism. Indeed, there are those who maintain that 
he was deeply influenced by the party of the Sad- 
ducees; that there was a strain of Hellenism in his 
nature. It is not saying too much to affirm that 
his life, as recorded in the gospels, was as kindred 
to Greek ideas as to those of the Hebrews. He 
did not practice the ascetic ideal for himself, nor 
did he enjoin it on his disciples. The people 
bitterly complained that he did not live a life after 
the pattern of John the Baptist, a typical Hebrew 
life ; and he was accused of being " a gluttonous 
man and a wine-bibber." The Baptist appealed 
to the Jews, for they could understand him; Jesus 
they could not understand. That a man could 
be a preacher of religion, and still live a life of 
human and healthful happiness, was a thing beyond 
their power to fathom. Here was one who went 
among rich and poor, good and bad; who began 
his ministry at a wedding feast; who accepted in- 
vitations from the religious and irreligious alike; 
who counted men and women of wealth, and no 

us 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

less the poorest of the poor, among his friends; who 
loved fellowship, and revelled in the joys of nature; 
who assailed all the external forms of sanctity and 
dared trust the instinctive outgoings of his whole 
being. 

Christian Science and the New Thought 

The secret of the surprising growth of the Chris- 
tian Science and the New Thought movements is to 
be found in the fact that they succeed, somehow, 
in making the presence of God real to men. As 
those who bring torches into a dark cave, these peo- 
ple have come into this materialistic age bearing 
aloft living flames of spiritual reality. Their talk 
is of God. They invent all sorts of strange and 
grotesque figures of speech by which they would 
express their consuming thought of Him. Their 
language is the language of those who wrestle in 
travail of mind, trying to make words that are 
heavy with the usages of many generations of mate- 
rialistic thought tell the story of the vision that has 
come to them. To all who have lost their sense of 
an underlying spirit, to men like those at Ephesus 
who said of themselves, " We have not so much as 
heard whether there be any Holy Ghost/' these 

116 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

people seem like crazy fanatics creating confusion 
among themselves, trying once again to build the 
Babel tower that shall lift itself above the clouds of 
heaven. The one splendidly assertive fact of the 
whole movement is overlooked, the fact that God 
is real to them; not real in a poetic sense, but real 
in a Christian sense; a living presence, a triumph- 
ant power, a constant comfort and ever springing 
fountain of eternal life. 

The Suffering God 

Our physical afflictions are but a part of the 
hidden, under side of the world process. As it is 
not for us to argue whether God could have made 
a perfect world, one without the disturbing forces 
that tear and rend and overthrow, so it is not for 
us to argue whether God might have given to every 
man and woman a perfect bodily mechanism in a 
perfectly adjusted environment. That he has not 
done so is due, we may be sure, to some deep neces- 
sity affecting the development of our own manhood. 
Physical affliction is a thing incidental to the natural 
laws of life and growth which God has ordained, 
laws to which he is as much bound as ourselves. 
We suffer because of these laws; we should suffer 

117 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

immeasurably more without them. We suffer be- 
cause of these laws ; God suffers also. " The whole 
creation, ,, declares the apostle, " groaneth and 
travaileth in pain ,, ; and the voice of its groaning 
is the utterance of the living and divine spirit 
within it. Does it seem a bold thing to say that 
God suffers? " Like as a Father pitieth his chil- 
dren " — is there nothing of suffering in a father's 
pity? In some way, deeper than any words of ours 
can explain, God has gone down into the depth 
with you and with me. Our sorrow is his sorrow. 
He is responsible for it in the sense that he is 
responsible for leading us along a hard way that 
issues at length, so whispers our faith, in some realm 
over which breaks the light that never shone on 
land or sea. 

A New Year Creed 

To do our work as it is given us by God ; to live 
simply and show hospitality of heart and home; 
to face each coming day with courage, indignant 
over wrongs, watchful in the interests of justice, 
and striving earnestly to achieve the ends of a 
higher patriotism; to heed the voice of conscience, 
render obedience to the law of right, practice a 

Il8 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

becoming self-denial, and in every emergency do 
the plain duty that lies next our hand; to show 
sympathy without sacrificing honor; to extend 
mercy without violating justice; to forgive, where 
men repent of wrong; to pity the unfortunate, 
knowing how weak are our own purposes; to be 
brothers unto one another, thinking kind thoughts, 
speaking gentle words, and practicing the gracious 
ministries of helpfulness; to love all things that are 
beautiful, whether of the world without or of 
heaven within; to bow reverently before the sacred 
mystery of life; to worship God as the source of 
our being, and the fountain of all good; to con- 
fess our sins, implore divine forgiveness, and pray 
for strength against temptation ; to be humble with- 
out self-depreciation, and holy without self-right- 
eousness; to remember the past with gratitude, en- 
dure the present with cheerfulness, and await the 
future with patience — let this be our New Year 
Creed. 

Foundations of Belief 

For more than a generation the Christian world 
has been passing through a great religious upheaval. 
During the last half-century our ideals and ways 
II 9 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

of life have undergone a process of transformation 
which we ourselves scarcely begin to realize. The 
keen questioning on religious subjects has been fear- 
less enough to take one's breath away. But our 
Christian faith has endured unshaken the search- 
ing investigation of both historian and scientist. 
Though beliefs have been overturned which men 
deemed immovable, this investigation on the whole 
has been conducted in a spirit of fairness and rever- 
ence. It is but just to acknowledge that most of those 
digging among the foundations have been men whose 
love for their fellow-men equalled their devotion to 
the truth. Many have been pained and troubled 
as they have witnessed the progress of this search- 
ing inquiry. Some have shut their eyes, and with 
angry protests on their lips declared that nothing 
said by the scholars w T as true; others have rushed 
to the opposite extreme, instant with the claim that 
all and more was true, so much more that the foun- 
dations of the faith were broken up; meanwhile, 
calmly and patiently, the vast majority of Christian 
believers have waited, confident that " the founda- 
tion of God standeth sure." 



120 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 
The Struggle for Other Lives 

In spite of ourselves we accord honor to men 
and women who give their lives to lifting the fallen 
and strengthening the weak. We would go so far 
as to proclaim that if nature be not in accord with 
this humanitarian impulse, so much the worse for 
nature; and, further, if God be not in sympathy 
with the high endeavor to lift up and save those 
who are down, so much the worse for such a God. 
If there be no pity in the earth beneath our feet, no 
pity in the stars above our heads, no pity in the 
power that throbs at the heart of the universe, 
then let man rise above nature; let him dare say 
that he will project into the order of this unkind 
world a new law; that the struggle for life shall 
not be a bare, unlovely, selfish struggle for one's 
own interest regardless of others, but that it shall 
be an unselfish, manly, divine struggle for the lives 
of others. Though it is not true, in the final anal- 
ysis, that all nature and the God of nature are on 
the side of the strong against the weak, yet if it 
were true, it could never change the fact wrought 
into the deepest consciousness of the race, the fact 
that the divinest act a man can perform in this 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

world is to take another man by the hand and lift 
him up. God or no God, that gospel must stand 
unto the end of time. If there were no pity in the 
heart of God, then would man be justified in hold- 
ing that the pity in his own heart gave him the right 
to be a god unto himself. 

Responsibility for the War of the Classes 

Think of a man in whose heart there is only sym- 
pathy for the rich and strong as against the poor 
and weak, whose hands are lifted in prayer on Sun- 
day and used on Monday to push men down into 
ruts where the wheels of hard fate will crush them, 
think of such a man worshiping God. Society is 
beset to-day by thousands of men of this type, men 
high up in the world of affairs, who care little more 
for the bruised humanity beneath them than they 
care for the dirt under their feet. These are the 
men who talk of the rights of property and the 
sacredness of invested interests; but you never hear 
them indulge in oratorical flights about the rights 
of man and the sacredness of the human soul. If, 
God forbid, we ever come to that day in our national 
life when class shall be arrayed against class, the 
poor against the rich, the ignorant against the 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

learned, the blind mob against those who represent 
tradition and custom and law, if that day ever comes, 
it will come through the moral lapse of many of 
those in positions of responsibility; it will come be- 
cause so many responsible by reason of their wealth, 
of their learning, of their strength, of their powder of 
life and death over the tens of thousands who make 
up the multitude, betrayed the powder given them; 
failed to reverence the life beneath them, lived their 
own lives in luxury, drove their own horses, sailed 
their own yachts, wore their own jewels, read their 
own books, shut up their own treasures of art in 
their own houses, and through all the whirl of self- 
indulgence never once paused to take by the hand, 
much less to lift up, the toilers gasping for the bare 
privilege of simply living. 

The True Cross Not Made of Wood 

The cross was not torn down and destroyed after 
the crucifixion of Jesus. It continued to exist in 
the lives of those who cherished his commandment, 
" Love one another, as I have loved you." It is 
here in the world to-day; it is the symbol of a law 
as old as the stars and of as pure a splendor — the 
law of self-sacrificing love, the vicariousness wrought 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

into all things from the beginning. It is the law 
by which Jesus lived, and the law by which every 
man must live if he is to enter into life. That Jesus 
loved the disciples, even unto death, had virtue for 
them only as they entered into its meaning by lov- 
ing one another even unto death. The atonement 
was not a thing for the disciples to receive; it was 
something for them to share. The gospel is not 
alone Jesus' sacrifice of his life for men; it is the 
revelation of the law that men must give their lives 
for one another. And if there is one reason above 
all others for the slow advance of the kingdom of 
God upon the earth, it lies in the fact that the 
church has fallen back in shameless dependence upon 
the sacrifice which Jesus made, blindly failing to see 
that his sacrifice is of avail only as it leads to a like 
sacrifice on man's part. To cling to the words of 
Jesus, " as I have loved you," to rest peacefully in 
something which has once for all been done for us, 
and fail to go forward under the impelling sense 
of his love to the fulfilment of his commandment, 
" that ye also love one another," is to miss the 
whole meaning of the gospel revelation. 



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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 
Immunity from Evil 

The method of the Puritan was born of a zeal 
innocent of great knowledge of life. If we were 
forced to choose between the Puritans and the Cav- 
aliers, I suppose few of us would hesitate. Yet the 
Puritan method, with all that can be said in its 
favor, was not the method of Christ ; nor was it any 
more scientific than Christian. To assail institu- 
tions because by the perversion of them men are de- 
bauched is as natural as it is futile. The Puritan 
sought to abolish the novel, to stop the theatre and 
the dance; he shattered the statue, ran his sword 
through the painting, and destroyed some of the fin- 
est monuments of architecture. Possibly he saved 
the England of Charles II, but if he did so it was 
by a method that fell far short of the best. All 
institutions that express the eternal spirit in man 
have come back and are here in the world to stay. 
We must teach men to use and not abuse them. We 
must not seek to put them down; we must seek to 
build ourselves up ; seek to render our lives immune 
from the evil in all things, that we may distill out 
the good thereby. And having done all that can be 
done we must remember that in God alone is our 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

sufficiency. " Because thou hast made the Lord, 
which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habita- 
tion ; there shall be no evil befall thee, neither shall 
any plague come nigh thy dwelling.' , 

The Revival of the Past 

All will agree that the church of to-day and the 
world of to-day need a deep and true revival of 
religion. How may this be brought about? In 
what direction are we to look for the next " great 
awakening " ? What is to be our answer to the 
people who come to us with the question, " What 
shall we do?" It is worth something, surely, 
to know the things we cannot do. We cannot 
hold to methods that are out of harmony with 
the whole thought and spirit of the present age. 
The revival that our fathers knew is a thing of 
the past; it has broken down in our hands, and 
only the crudest fanaticism will seek to unite the 
pieces into a perfect whole. It was a method of 
promoting the spiritual life of the community which 
had its points of strength; but it was doomed from 
the beginning because of certain inherent weak- 
nesses. It placed too great emphasis upon the sal- 
vation of the individual soul. What would we 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

think of the surf-fighter on our coast whose chief 
concern during the hours of shipwreck was his own 
safety? We have outlived the time when people 
see any heroism in singing, 

" A charge to keep I have, 
A God to glorify, 
A never-dying soul to save 
And fit it for the sky," 

They see heroism in this only as it is completed by 
the other stanza, 

" To serve the present age, 
My calling to fulfill ; 
Oh, may it all my powers engage 
To do my Master's will." 

Jesus as a Layman 

Never in all the history of the Hebrew race had 
the priesthood of the ceremonial been so deeply 
intrenched as when Jesus began to teach. Against 
this type of priesthood and the idea of religion 
which it involved, Jesus set himself with quiet and 
persistent courage. He was wholly without official 
authority. He was not of the family of Aaron. 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

He never wore the sacred robes of priestly office. 
He did not offer sacrifices or lead in the holy rites 
of Jewish worship. He was what to-day we would 
call a layman. His was a ministry almost en- 
tirely apart from the established order of priestly 
service. He was one of the people and lived the 
life of the people. From the first he was a work- 
ingman, a simple carpenter by trade. The time 
came when the message which God had given him 
burned like a flame in his soul and drove him out to 
his strange ministry. No longer did he leave his 
followers in doubt concerning his mission and his 
message. He, too, believed in God; not a God 
who is hungry or thirsty and therefore requires gifts 
of food and drink; not a God who cannot be ap- 
proached except by elaborate rites and ceremonies; 
but a God who is a spirit animating all nature and 
dwelling in the heart of man, a God to whom any 
child of earth can come without ritual or mediator, 
a God who loves mercy rather than sacrifice, and 
desires that all men dwell together in the spirit of 
brotherly love. 



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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 
The Divine Fire 

I hear men say that they have given up Chris- 
tianity. A man never gives up Christianity by 
changing his opinion. He gives it up only when he 
cuts himself from the inspirational sources which 
have kept his moral nature warm and true. The 
religion of Christ is a vital thing. It is something 
that may burn and throb within the cramped en- 
closure of almost any kind of belief. To be alive 
in every bone and muscle and nerve is health. To 
be alive in every part of one's moral nature, in affec- 
tions, will, conscience, is religion. And the more 
alive a man is, the more religious. Do the fires 
of your devotional nature burn low? Has your 
conscience lost its tone and your will its ardor? 
Then the thing you need is not a new theology but 
a new power of life; something momentous — storm, 
flood, or fire, — to sweep through your moral nature. 
If men would cease thinking that Jesus came to give 
the world a fixed system of doctrine which must be 
believed, and understand that his Evangel is as the 
angel descending into the pool of a man's spiritual 
nature to disturb the waters until they possessed 
life-giving properties, then would they see that giv- 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

ing up the old theology, or giving up the new the- 
ology, need not involve the surrender of Christianity. 
Doubtless it is of importance that we have a true 
interpretation of life, but the thing of first im- 
portance is: Have we life itself? Has our spiritual 
nature been quickened? Is there burning upon the 
altars of our hearts the divine fire ? 

Every Age Has Its New Theology 

Some maintain that in the very nature of things 
there can be no further progress in revelation; that 
the process of enlightenment was consummated in 
the three brief years of Christ's ministry. They 
speak of the Christian faith as a " sacred deposit " ; 
whereas Jesus taught that it was a seed. Indeed, 
it would seem that his own word forever settled 
the question of religious enlightenment; whether it 
was to be a continuous, progressive movement of 
thought, or whether it was to remain a thing for- 
ever fixed, as if cast in a mold. The history of the 
Christian Church since the earliest times would 
seem to show that there has been a constant broad- 
ening and transforming of thought. I have heard 
men talk about a new theology as if it were some- 
thing undreamed of until now. As a matter of fact 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

the Christian world has never been without a new 
theology. Every age has seen a life-and-death 
struggle between some old theology and some new 
vision of truth. And the new has always conquered, 
not because it has been true and the other false, 
but because men find it possible, as the world 
grows older, to interpret the same spiritual experi- 
ences in more exact and scientific language. It 
would be strange if a man of threescore and ten 
could not give a clearer and more intelligible ac- 
count of his religious experiences than he could have 
given as a boy of fifteen. And would it not be 
strange if the church of the twentieth century could 
not state its faith in terms of exacter meaning and 
stricter scientific import than the church that wit- 
nessed the ministrations of the apostle Paul? 

The Secret of Faith 

He who refuses to go with the Christ down into 
the toil and weariness of an actual test of his gospel 
can never share with him the unspeakable joy that 
comes through the triumph of his faith. If men 
think they can live selfish lives, indulge themselves 
in all the desires of the flesh, keep away from the 
suffering and sorrow and need of the great world, 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

and then expect, when the cross lifts itself on their 
way and they are caught in the grip of some terrible 
affliction, to find in their hearts a faith that shall 
burst into a song of triumph, they are fearfully 
wrong. Only the man who has made himself a 
savior to others in their need will find any salvation 
or triumphant faith in the hour of his own need. In 
spite of all orthodox belief, of all conventional pro- 
fession, the man who refuses to make the actual test 
of Christ's gospel, who refuses to be in his time and 
place a savior to men, will, by the very constitution 
of his spiritual nature, find it impossible to enter into 
the triumphant joy of Jesus' faith. When he comes, 
as come he must, to the hour of his cross, there will 
be no buoyant tides of faith and hope and love in 
his soul, there will be no song of victory upon his 
lips. No man can ever get into fellowship with 
Christ and share his glorious faith in God, the love 
of God and the eternal life with God, who is not 
willing to give himself as Christ gave himself. 

Saving or Serving Men — Which? 

We need clearly to understand that we have 
nothing to do with saving people. That is God's 
work. Our mission is to serve men. The revival 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

the twentieth century needs is a revival based on 
righteousness and not on feeling. The present-day 
demand upon the church should be fully understood. 
It is the minister's task to follow in the footsteps of 
the old biblical revivalists who dug down to the 
foundation of things. Like John the Baptist we 
are called in this day to emphasize the principle of 
social service. The spirit of the age demands the 
full acceptance of this principle by the churches. 
In all other departments of life the old formula, 
every man for himself, is dying out. It should have 
no place in religion. Christian people should be 
ashamed to speak of themselves as " saved " so long 
as others are unsaved. Men say our churches have 
lost power. How shall that power be regained? 
The answer is in the Bible — Feed the hungry, clothe 
the naked; let your charity be followed by justice 
and righteousness. The revival that exploits sinners 
for the purpose of swelling our church member- 
ship, is doomed from the start. But the revival that 
is based squarely on self-sacrifice in social service, 
will commend itself to the world and win the re- 
spect of men. Let the church forget its membership. 
Let it stop saving its own soul for a while. Let it 
go to the world with open hands and open heart. 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

If the people will not come to the church, let the 
church search out the people, to save them, not from 
some imaginary hell in the next world, but from a 
very real hell in the world that now is, the hell of 
poverty and ignorance and sin. 

Let Us Learn to Have Pity 

There is a verse in the book of Jonah w T hich 
strangely moves one who reads it understandingly. 
God is represented as saying to the prophet: 
" Should not I have pity on Nineveh, that great 
city; wherein are more than sixscore thousand 
persons that cannot discern between their right 
hand and their left hand; and also much cattle" 
God cares — cares for the children, cares even for 
the cattle. The sob and dumb agony of a world 
that travaileth in pain is in that last clause. The 
cattle and the horses and all broken beasts of 
burden — God loves them! He knows when they 
are hungry, he knows when they are in pain, he 
knows when men abuse them. Here also the words 
of Jesus come to us with peculiar impressiveness, 
" Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing, and 
one of them shall not fall on the ground without 
your Father." To my mind the surest evidence of 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

the divine worth of our Christian religion is to be 
found in its attitude to the whole wide world of 
suffering creatures that cries out for pity. Rightly 
to relate ourselves to that great underworld of crea- 
tion which can speak to us only through its patient 
suffering, this, it seems to me, is to offer acceptable 
worship unto God — 

" He prayeth well who loveth well 
Both man and bird and beast; 
He prayeth best who loveth best 
All things both great and small, — 
For the dear God who loveth us 
He made and loveth all." 

The Modern View of Punishment for 
Sin 

So long as men think God's laws arbitrary in- 
stead of natural in their operation, they will con- 
tinue to hug to themselves false notions of escape 
from punishment; but let them understand that law 
is ordained of God and part of man's very being, 
and their soft theories of life will go to the winds. 
" Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also 
reap." God will do all possible with what is left 

135 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

a man's nature after transgression, but God himself 
cannot make the man what he would have been had 
he not gone wrong. To me the modern view of 
sin and its punishment is far more appalling than the 
vulgar hell-fire preaching to which I listened as a 
boy. In that preaching there was always the possi- 
bility of escape. Indeed, Jesus was usually set forth 
as one who had come to save us from something we 
deserved, not as one who w T ould make all possible out 
of the broken life. The awfulness of Jesus' teach- 
ing is in its inevitableness ; man's own doom wrapped 
up within himself. The blessings of the kingdom 
are within; and so, also, the woes of hell. Every 
great poet, every great prophet has seen and given 
expression to this fact. Even the pagan Omar 
Khayyam notes it in a verse of exceptional force: 

" I sent my Soul through the Invisible, 
Some letter of that After-life to spell ; 

And by and by my Soul return'd to me, 
And answer'd, ' I myself am Heav'n and Hell.' ' 

The Victory of Defeat 

As society is now organized the vast majority of 
people are destined to failure; that is, if we make 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

the standard of success a financial one. Shall a 
man, then, give up the struggle to succeed in a 
worldly and material way? Shall he abandon his 
endeavor to acquire wealth? By no means. But 
he should not estimate his life in terms of material 
success. He should set his face like flint against 
the cheap and vulgar standards of the day. He 
should strive first to be an honest man, and if that 
mean defeat, as the world counts defeat, then let 
him stand defeated; but let him know in his own 
heart, that by the very defeat he has achieved a vic- 
tory. What America needs more than anything 
else to-day is men who believe that it is better to go 
down to failure with the right, than to go on to 
success with the wrong. Bad principles, concessions 
to evil, unlawful methods, these things may mean 
worldly success, but they also mean moral and spir- 
itual failure. Fidelity to conscience, adherence to 
right principles, obedience to the law, enmity to evil, 
independence and truthfulness and honor, these 
things may mean overwhelming defeat, as the world 
judges, but they mean also moral mastery, a spiritual 
victory of inestimable reach. Let every man try 
to make his life outwardly a success; but if the situ- 
ation be such that he fails, let him take courage, let 

*37 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

him understand that the only kind of failure which 
counts in the summing up of things is the failure 
inward. He who lowers his ideals, he w T ho com- 
promises his principles, he who sacrifices his sense 
of business honor and sets at naught the admonitions 
of his conscience in order to succeed, may attain out- 
ward success, but he himself will be a moral bank- 
rupt. " It is better," says Ruskin, " to prefer hon- 
orable defeat to a mean victory." And the words 
of Browning are to the same effect: 

" Better have failed in the high aim, as I, 
Than vulgarly in the low aim succeed." 

A Book for Two Worlds 

The New Testament, upon first reading, is sim- 
ple and plain and practical; upon second reading it 
is profound and strangely idealistic. Looked at in 
one way, it is the most direct and matter-of-fact 
book in existence. Looked at in another way, it is 
all romance and poetry. No other book comes quite 
so close to the life we are actually living in the 
world. No other book so opens our vision into the 
wide realm of the unknown. This book and its 
Christ are of permanent value to the world because 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

they do something more than tell us how we should 
live; they reveal to us life's highest and noblest 
ends. The religion of Jesus Christ draws a man 
out into the exploration of the spiritual realm which 
lies beyond and above him. The appeal of Christ al- 
lures us, not because he establishes certain principles 
and rules of conduct, but because he convinces us that 
in him is the solution of the problem of the un- 
known. The world has listened to Christ because 
he came with something more than a guess concern- 
ing God and heaven and immortality. What gives 
Christianity living and vital power over your life 
and mine is the fact that in Christ and through 
Christ the great beyond challenges us to an immeas- 
urable hope. 

The Faith of the Future 

The faith of the future will speak of God as 
all in all, rather than over all. Instead of preach- 
ing the incarnation as a certain dated fact of his- 
tory, it will emphasize the universal indwelling of 
God, and behold in Christ the crowning example of 
universal experience. It will conceive of revelation 
as the natural unfolding of the soul, not as an out- 
ward and miraculous event. It will not turn to 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

the Bible as the final source of authority; it will 
hold that authority is in the secret places of one's 
own soul; yet it will use the Bible as the highest 
and noblest expression of divine experience. The 
faith of the future will not speak of the fall of 
man, but will dwell much on the rise of man, his 
ascent from brute conditions of existence; it will 
not preach total depravity, but will emphasize sin 
as the deliberate choice of a free man to live in his 
lower nature. The faith of the future will not 
cease to preach the vicariousness of the atonement, 
but it will find in that vicariousness a universal law, 
an inwrought necessity springing out of the solidar- 
ity and brotherhood of the race. The faith of the 
future will hold to the reality of divine judgment, 
not as a spectacular and arbitrary event, but rather 
as the inevitable and natural working out of those 
laws of right and wrong by which the heavenly con- 
dition of character may be obtained. It is easy to 
prophesy that this will be the faith of to-morrow, 
for wherever the new science and the new criticism 
have had a fair chance it is the faith of to-day. 



140 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

Obedience, the First Step in the Chris- 
tian Life 

The first step of the Christian life is always one 
of obedience. There was a great difference between 
the methods of Jesus and John; but at this point 
they were in striking agreement. Both emphasized 
the need of beginning a religious movement in the 
realm of moral obligation rather than in the realm 
of spiritual ecstasy. The words with which John 
launched his revival were moral and practical. 
Jesus set men to work fulfilling the obligations of 
brotherhood. His word to the people was always 
the familiar, " Follow me." And when they fol- 
lowed him, it was to find that he never led to the 
synagogue, but straight out into the great world 
where men and women were suffering and dying 
for want of help. John the Baptist saw with a 
prophet's eye that the religion which overlooked or 
was indifferent to social evils was a sham and a 
mockery. It was salt that had lost its savour; it 
was a lamp that had gone out. Therefore he bore 
down on the conscience of the people with burning 
speech that swept towards the fulfilment of moral 
obligations. It was as if he had said to the people, 
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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

Look you to the moral side of your life and God 
will care for the religious; you fulfil the sacred 
obligations of brotherhood, and in doing that you 
will discover to your soul's joy the blessed and secret 
companionship of your heavenly Father. 

The True Attitude Towards Present-Day 
Reform Movements 

What should be the attitude of a man to-day as 
he faces the most serious problems the race has yet 
been called upon to solve? Many new movements 
are abroad. Great industrial and political changes 
are taking place. Shall we stand aside and wait, 
flattering ourselves that it is a mark of superiority 
to hold ourselves aloof from the vulgar wranglings 
of the crowd? Shall we piously exclaim, " This 
is God's work; he will see to it"? Or shall we 
take sides and throw our influence, such as it is, 
into the scale for or against these new movements 
that are agitating society? There can be only one 
answer to this question. We must first try, every 
man for himself, to get to the bottom of the matter. 
God has given us minds for this very purpose. We 
must use them. We must read and study and think 
and pray. We must seek for the causes of the agi- 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

tation. We must try to understand the wonderful 
thing that God is striving to get done in the world 
to-day; and when we are clear in our minds, take 
sides positively, aggressively, and without compro- 
mise. If at times the way seems dark, as at times 
it will, then let us wait, for wait at such a time we 
must. But let not our waiting be like that of the 
traveller who lies down by the road to sleep; let it 
be like the waiting of one who gropes anxiously in 
the darkness with face turned wistfully towards that 
heaven out of which the light shall appear. 

Are Our Sunday Laws Religious or 
Secular? 

Our Sunday laws are not religious but secular 
in character. We have here no union of church 
and state; in the free air of America we have no 
laws restraining men in matters of religious ob- 
servance. When a company of citizens insist that 
a certain Sunday law be kept they are only exercis- 
ing their civic rights. The state has not made these 
laws because it believes that certain indulgences in 
the way of labor or amusement are wicked ; it is not 
a matter of conscience with the state but a matter of 
purely physical necessity. It may be true that the 

143 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

state would never have set up a civic Sabbath had 
it not been for religious pressure; but we are not 
to forget that the foundations themselves rest upon 
the nature of things. Even if men ceased to believe 
the Bible and lost all faith in the existence of God, 
it would not materially affect the civic Sabbath or 
the foundations on which it rests. In behalf of this 
institution we appeal not to this or that interpreta- 
tion of the Old Testament, but to man's nature 
itself, to his necessity, to his inborn right; we ap- 
peal, furthermore, to those principles of the common 
law and that statutory legislation by which the state 
purposes to safeguard the well-being of every citizen. 

The Revelation Within the Mantle 

Our doctrine of divine immanence teaches us that 
God is in the world as power, that he is in the 
mind as thought, and that he is in the heart as 
love. Evolution teaches us that God is himself a 
part of the world process; that he, like ourselves, 
is bound by his laws. The faith of to-day declares 
that God could no more have stayed the earthquake 
in California than he could have broken up his 
throne or annihilated his nature. Beyond our ken 
something is being worked out, something w T ide 

144 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

and infinite, as deep as hell, as high as heaven, some 
purpose that wholly transcends our limited thought 
and sight. The universe travaileth and groaneth 
in pain. God suffers as we suffer; he toils as we 
toil ; he cannot escape the rough and ragged methods 
of a nature which is in process of creation ; but out 
of the mystery he speaks to us in the still small 
voice, and pleads with us to be patient. As the 
mother whispers words of comfort in the ear of 
the child whom she pains by some mother-surgery, 
so God whispers to us and tells us that these things 
must needs be. He who is willing reverently to 
wrap his face in his mantle and listen to the deep- 
est whisperings of his moral nature, will find that 
the God who seemed so cruel in wind and earth- 
quake and fire is making himself known as a heav- 
enly Father of infinite love and infinite pity. 

Syllogism and Star 

The Christian religion draws me, not because it 
explains things, but because it reveals how much 
there is to be explained. Were the New Testa- 
ment a book of definitions, I should care little for 
it. It is a book of far-reaching intuitions, of dreams 
and visions having strange and convincing import. 

145 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

It has to do with experiences that stand related to 
the deeper and more serious aspects of our nature. 
There is little of the syllogism and much of the star. 
It tells us of the world's supreme effort to fathom 
the mystery of our being. It speaks of the things 
that dignify life and have power to glorify the 
rudest experiences. Strange stories are here of men 
who wrestled with the gods in a sense nobler than 
that known to Iliad or Odyssey, men who had seen 
things they could not describe, who spake as chil- 
dren, stammering out a simple faith. As we read 
these pages we feel that others have felt with us; 
that they too have grappled with the problems of 
life and death, that they too have looked deep into 
the world's sorrow with eyes unafraid. With them 
we take our place ; we feel that we are of their com- 
pany. They speak to us and we understand them. 
What care we if they have nothing mathematically 
definite to relate? They have dreamed, and we 
too have dreams; they have hoped, and we too have 
hopes; they have followed the star, and we too 
follow on. 



146 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 
Heart, Head, and Hand 

By what right do men say that religion is of 
the heart? By what right do men say it is of the 
head? It is of the whole man — the heart that feels, 
the mind that interprets, and the hand that acts. 
" Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
heart, and with all thy mind, and with all thy 
strength! " I venture to maintain that one's moral 
and religious life cannot be developed in any high 
sense without the corresponding development of the 
power to think one's way through to a rational and 
clearly defined interpretation of spiritual experi- 
ence. " The higher developments of the moral sen- 
timent involve a considerable enlightenment of the 
intelligence," says a recent book on psychology. No 
truer word w T as ever spoken. And just here I em- 
brace the opportunity to emphasize this thought, for 
it is a thought of capital importance. If religion is 
of heart, head, and hand, then there is no service 
rendered by one member that has not a reactive in- 
fluence upon the others. He who learns to feel the 
woes of men will find that his thought is clearer and 
his hand more ready for some act of service. He 
who thnnvs himself into the midst of the world's 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

great needs will find that both heart and mind are 
quickened. And he who thinks his way through to 
some clear apprehension of his relationship to God 
and man will find his personal life enriched thereby. 

The Unseen Battlefield 

We have no right to estimate the struggle of 
any life by the evidences that appear on the surface. 
The real issues of our being are wrought in secret. 
The great battles are fought in the soul, with no eye 
to mark the flood and ebb of strife but the eye of 
God. You have grappled with adverse circum- 
stances, and are now wrestling against inner forces 
which are to you distressingly tangible and real. 
The man by your side seems a creature apart from all 
this; a conventional, uninteresting life his, you may 
think, a life that knows nothing of the forces against 
which you have to contend. That is a superficial 
judgment, a judgment lacking in the insight w T hich 
penetrates to the wilderness realm of experience! 
The soul of that man whose life is apparently 
so free from all strife may be a battle-ground 
over which sweep the opposing forces of right 
and wrong. In that soul there may be tragedies 
of conscience, desperate attacks of the will on 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

ignoble passions, love and pity contending with 
cruelty and selfishness, truth battling with error, 
doubt assailing faith and sincerity, greed and lust 
and cheap ambition locked in conflict with benev- 
olence and honor and ardor for some high spiritual 
ideal — all that speaks of courage and justice, of 
mercy and humility, of gentleness and reverence and 
beauty, may in that life be drawn up in battle- 
array against the unseen forces of evil that lift 
themselves out of the primeval depths which un- 
derlie every man's life. 

Spiritual Religion 

Happy the man who holds steadily to Jesus' con- 
ception of religion as an inward and spiritual power. 
No other teacher has gone so deep into man's being 
for his explanations of life. He began his ministry 
by declaring the kingdom of God to be within. He 
never wavered from this position; more than that, 
he embraced every opportunity to emphasize it. His 
whole teaching was a constant effort to show the 
spirituality of religion, to make clear that it is not 
a thing of form or of belief but of the Holy Spirit's 
power. The seat of religion is not in the church 
or the book, but in the heart of man himself. 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

" 00(1," he exclaimed, " is a Spirit, and they that 
worship him must worship him in spirit and in 
truth." Christ's preaching was intellectual in the 
highest and truest sense, yet we never look upon his 
ministry in that light. His parables do not belong 
to the literature of knowledge, but to the literature 
of power. His life breathed the spirit of power ; his 
words quickened in his hearers a sense of power. 
" The words that I speak unto you," said Jesus, 
" they are spirit and they are life." He had no 
other conception of religion. We are told in the 
record of Luke that his last words were these: 
" Tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be 
endued with power from on high." And when we 
read of the day of Pentecost and the outpouring of 
God's blessing on those early followers, we begin to 
understand what Jesus meant by a spiritual religion. 
From that time to this men have not been wanting 
whose supreme endeavor has been the setting forth 
of the gospel of Christ as " the power of God unto 
salvation." 

We Enter Life Through Lives 

" If ye would enter into life," said Jesus, " keep 
the commandments." And when the young man 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

answered that he had kept the commandments, 
Jesus showed him he had failed to keep the 
one commandment in w r hich all the others were 
fulfilled — the commandment to give himself and all 
that he had in love. The young man who went 
away sorrowful knew T the Master's secret, even 
though he had refused to meet the conditions; 
that secret was, if one is to enter into life, he 
must enter through lives. Jesus was the king of 
life because he was the king of love. He found 
it possible to give life to men, because from the 
depth of a rich and full nature he loved men. To 
love is to live. To give love is to give life. If 
men would understand and act upon this; if they 
could be made to see that all their running 
to and fro in the search of wealth and fame and 
pleasure is but the evidence of an unquenchable 
thirst for life driving from experience to experience 
in a tumult of restlessness ; if they could be made to 
see that such fulness of life as they desired could be 
realized only as they learned to love, only as they 
made their entrance to life through lives, they would 
take themselves more seriously in hand, they would 
gird themselves for a grim fight against selfish- 
ness, they wmdd cultivate a loving interest in others 

151 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

and enter thereby upon a new and living way of 
experience. Your difficulty and mine — is it other 
than the old difficulty of those in the parable con- 
cerning whom the poet writes — 

" Themselves loved themselves; 
Spent their own oil in feeding their own lamps, 
That their own faces might grow bright thereby." 

The True Apostolic Succession 

In the continued leadership of the Holy Spirit is 
to be found the true apostolic succession. Would 
that our Congregationalism had always been re- 
gardful of the Lord's pledge of the Spirit's guid- 
ance: " He shall take of mine, and shall show it 
unto you." The very genius of our fellowship 
presupposes a full and loyal dependence on the 
Holy Spirit. We have no other semblance of spir- 
itual authority among us. We have been content 
with a loose organization because of our supreme 
confidence in the unifying power of the Spirit. And 
yet the tendencies that from time to time manifest 
themselves in our church show all too plainly, 
that there have been men among us w T ho feared 
to trust the leading of the Spirit, men startled by 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

the large implications of truth which such guidance 
seemed to involve. They would have the disciples 
of the Lord pause in their victorious march and rest 
upon their arms. They w T ould have the sword of 
the Spirit sheathed. They would silence that noble 
company of patient and reverent scholars who have 
discovered for us the Bible anew. Such men have 
forgotten the great word of John Robinson, which 
should be as familiar to every Congregational 
teacher and layman as the Golden Rule: " If God 
shall reveal anything to you by any other instru- 
ment of his, be as ready to receive it as ever you 
were to receive anything by my ministry; for I am 
confident that God has more truth yet to break out 
of his holy word.'' 



How God May Be Known 

That God lives is an assumption as necessary 
to all rational thinking as to all holy living. 
Every great poet and prophet has assumed the real- 
ity of the Divine Life. The testimony of sense is no 
more reliable than the testimony of spiritual experi- 
ence. We would find it difficult to demonstrate, in 
terms of mathematical exactness, the existence of 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

our own personalities. Yet to doubt here would 
put us to " permanent intellectual confusion. " The 
methods of physical or mathematical science should 
be ruled out when we are attempting to solve relig- 
ious problems. " To the methods of physical sci- 
ence," it has been said, " God is unknown." But it 
does not follow that he is unknown to the methods of 
spiritual science. Aristotle laid down the principle 
that every object of research has its own law of evi- 
dence. Apply that principle to the words of Jesus, 
" Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see 
God." The truth of this statement cannot be fig- 
ured out as one figures out a proposition in Euclid. 
It must be lived out. There must be conforrnity 
to the laws of spiritual evidence before one may 
affirm or deny the truth of this utterance. God is 
not known to us through the evidence of the five 
senses, but through the evidence of that " sixth 
sense " which Whittier called the " inner vision." 
Science says, " Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in 
sensu." That nothing is in the mind which is not 
first in the senses is quite true, if we include that 
higher sense, that organ of spiritual knowledge 
which the New Testament calls faith. It is through 
faith that we can know God. It is by faith alone 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

that we can be sure of the realities of the spiritual 
life. 

How Much It Costs to Love 

On every side we hear discussions about what the 
modern church should do. It must first of all go 
back to the cross; go back with all its selfishness, 
with its mockeries of fashion and form, go back with 
confessions of worldly compromise, with penitent 
acknowledgments that it has loved itself better 
than it has loved humankind. At the foot of the 
cross the church must learn anew how much it costs 
to love as Jesus loved. What would happen if our 
churches were baptized anew into the love of Jesus 
Christ, if ministers began to love their people as 
Jesus loved his disciples, if these people began 
to love one another in sincerity and tenderness 
of heart? Suppose our churches should suddenly 
begin to love the world better than they loved 
themselves; suppose they should cease to discuss 
methods of persuading the community into the sup- 
port of the church and concerned themselves only 
with the heroisms of sacrifice by which they might 
serve the community. If such a condition were 
present, can you doubt that the problem of the 

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SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

modern church would be solved; can you doubt 
that the kingdom of God would come conquering, 
subduing, and sanctifying? The church has to-day, 
as always, the problem of the world's righteousness 
in her keeping. When she dares, with the vast re- 
sources of wealth and pow T er at her command, to 
lift herself up to the high demand that her Lord 
makes upon her, the kingdom of God will rise tri- 
umphant on the earth. 



Men Who Buy and Sell Christ 

The contest for wealth is now so bitter, the eager- 
ness to get on in the world so pronounced, that men 
are ceasing to attach sufficient importance to the old 
verities of friendship and personal honor. We are 
so keen to cultivate ourselves that we have no time 
to cultivate our friends. We are so burdened with 
things that our attention is withdrawn from people. 
We are so eager to get rich that we are forgetting 
all about the great causes clamoring for heroic ser- 
vice. If some Paul should appear on the scene, men 
would cry out against him as a disturber of the 
peace because he got in the way of their personal 
ambitions. It is a smart age, but it is not an heroic 

156 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

age. The buildings that we are putting up are 
no doubt higher than those which our fathers built, 
but it is becoming a serious question whether the 
men of to-day stand as high as our fathers stood. 
Startling revelations concerning modern industrial 
piracy have of late tested the faith of many, not 
only in the institutions of our country, but in 
the men who have the power to make and un- 
make institutions. These men are familiar with 
Paul of Asia Minor; these men admire Christ of 
Galilee; these men are attached to conventional 
Christianity; these men, too many of them, sit in 
the pews of our churches. But they go out from 
the house of God to exploit public trust for pri- 
vate gain. They hear from the pulpit on Sunday 
Paul's message from the prison cell in Rome, but 
Monday finds them in Thessalonica filling their 
greedy hands with the hard-earned savings of the 
poor. Friendship, loyalty to ideals, the spirit that 
leads a man to set his face squarely for principle, 
in practice these are to them but will-o'-the-wisps. 
Paul freezing in prison, an old broken-down man, 
writing to Timothy for his cloak; Paul going out 
to martyrdom because he would not deny Christ 
— what means this to a certain type of modern 

157 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

man who buys and sells Christ every hour of the 
day? 

The Desire to Live After Death 

Now and then I meet people who claim that the 
subject of immortality is a matter of indifference to 
them. But I cannot think that such men and women 
are in health of mind and soul. Some strange ex- 
perience has turned them from normal habits of 
thought and impulses of feeling. Perhaps the in- 
tellect has been baffled in its keen search for incon- 
trovertible evidence of immortality and has at last 
been thrown back upon itself in despair. Or it 
may be that sorrow has bitten deeply into the heart. 
Utter weariness tends to crush out all desire. He 
who to-day experiences little of life's fulness can 
have no compelling passion for the life of to-morrow. 
Some there are — and only God knows why — to 
whom life has been dealt in such cruel measure 
that it fairly wrings from them a strange and un- 
natural cry for death — 

" I could lie down like a tired child, 
And weep away the life of care 
Which I have borne, and yet must bear, — 

158 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

Till death, like sleep, might steal on me, 

And I might feel in the warm air 

My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea 

Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony." 

And yet we may question whether there be not 
more of poetry in these lines than literal fact. We 
may imagine that we long for death when it is only 
sleep we crave, rest for tired heart and brain. 
Whatever men and women may say, I cannot 
believe that there are those w T ho really long for 
death, at least for eternal death. I believe that a 
nobler poet than Shelley was nearer the truth when 
he wrote — 

" Whatever crazy sorrow saith, 
No life that breathes with human breath 
Has ever truly longed for death." 

The History of the Race a Drama 

The events of history are not like the careless 
stories told around the camp-fire, where one tale 
casually suggests another. These events are woven 
into a drama which unfolds itself upon the wide 
stage of the world's life, act by act, and scene by 
scene. To-day we listen to the hero as he reads his 

159 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

lines; to-morrow we are watching with breathless in- 
terest the machinations of the villain. On this part 
of the stage is being enacted a tragedy; on that, a 
comedy. It is difficult to detect at times how a par- 
ticular scene relates itself to the central plot of the 
drama, while with other scenes the connection is 
plainly evident. Some of the characters occupy 
more time than they should; while others who re- 
main in the background, are clearly deserving of 
more prominent parts. One by one the actors come 
upon the stage, pass across it and disappear; and 
back of them streams the endless multitude of those 
who have no speaking parts, who never so much as 
suspect that they stand related to the unfolding 
of the world-drama. And even the chief actors 
themselves see only a little way into the profound 
intricacies of the plot which is being developed from 
scene to scene and from act to act. No man can 
tell how the great drama will be concluded. He 
can only watch as the various threads of purpose 
unwind themselves. As he sees that thus far in the 
development of the drama moral motives have every- 
where prevailed, hope alone can be his cue. There 
can be no doubt that some deep purpose, " some far- 
off divine event," is being wrought out. Beneath 

1 60 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

all history there is a philosophy, a relation of cause 
to effect. Every great movement of the past is a 
scene, or it may be an act, by which the plot 
of the drama is advanced towards its final de- 
nouement. Every judgment of an historical event 
or movement is utterly worthless which does not 
take into account the fact that our world-life is 
a drama, and that each particular event or move- 
ment is to be estimated in its relation to the central 
plot, is to be judged by all that led up to it and all 
that issues from it. 

Is God Omnipotent? 

The curse of theological thinking has been the 
bald assumption that God is an infinite being of 
power and authority sitting somewhere apart from 
his universe and directing the forces of the world 
and the affairs of men according to his own arbi- 
trary decisions. This conception of God is against 
the teachings of science; it is against the highest 
wisdom of Scripture. " My father worketh," how 
these words go straight to the heart of the mat- 
ter. God is not sitting apart on some distant 
throne; he is at work within his world and deep 
down in our human lives. Every law is the strain 

161 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

of the Almighty hand. His perfection is limited 
by the imperfections of his creation. The work 
that God is doing is not yet finished, and like 
any other unfinished work it reveals rough outlines. 
I am not disposed to argue the question whether 
God could have made a perfect world by the sheer 
and instant exercise of his will. We are to take 
things exactly as we find them. The imperfections 
we discern God is working to overcome. Fam- 
ine, pestilence, disease, death, — these are all parts 
of the world-process, and God can no more stay 
their ravages than he can set aside the mysterious 
necessities of his own law. His will is not capri- 
cious, his power is not arbitrary. He surely re- 
spects his own great plan. In the far reach of 
things he cannot turn away from his own high 
thought of that which is good, to accommodate 
himself to our low thought of what is desirable. 
He calls upon you and me to be co-workers with 
him in the great task to which he has set himself: 
and who shall say how much of this vast sum of 
what we call human ills is due to the divine law 
and the divine nature, and how much of it is due 
to the fact that we have not lived our lives and done 
our work as we should ? 

162 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 
A Startling and Revolutionary Message 

Suppose Christ were here in the world, unknown, 
and became the minister of one of our large, well- 
to-do, fashionable churches. What do you think 
w^ould be his message? I would not, of course, 
venture to define it; and yet it is not too much 
to assume that in substance it would be the mes- 
sage he preached two thousand years ago, and 
that it would sound as startling and revolutionary 
to the people as it sounded then. Would he not 
say to them, as he said to the w T ell-to-do religious 
people of his day: " All this discussion about the 
things you are to believe, and the forms you are 
to use in worship, all this, though it may be im- 
portant in its place, does not come first. Do not 
make the mistake of putting religious professions of 
any kind in the place of that which is truly re- 
ligious." Would he not see, with a vision before 
which all thoughts and motives lay exposed, that 
the word needed by the well-dressed congregation 
of to-day is the word that he preached to the 
simple folk who gathered around him on the moun- 
tainside? " Not every one that saith unto me, 
Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven ; 

163 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

but he that doeth the will of my Father which is 
in heaven. " The difficulty that our Lord encoun- 
tered was not the difficulty of finding people ready 
to listen, not the difficulty of unfolding the truth, 
of arousing the humane sentiments, of stirring the 
emotions of sympathy and fellow feeling; it was 
the almost insurmountable difficulty of changing the 
intellectual and emotional processes which go on in 
the minds and hearts of those who sit under the 
preaching of the Word ; changing them into the 
terms of a will-power that shall send people forth 
to shape the truth into deeds, and to w T eave into 
the common life the sentiments which move them 
to the depth of their being in the hour of worship. 

The Ghosts of Past Sins 

There is no more harmful misinterpretation of 
the gospel than the assumption that we may avoid 
the natural consequences of our deeds. Much 
praise has been bestowed upon those who late in 
life have been redeemed as by fire from their evil 
ways. They have been held up as examples of the 
gospel's power; and at times their intense fervor, 
springing from a deep sense of escape from the 
enslavement of sin, has deceived us into a conviction 

164 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

that the piety of one who has been a great sinner 
is more to be desired than the piety of a man 
who has developed from boyhood a character of 
goodness. This, I think, comes of our superfi- 
cial insight into the springs of human life. If you 
could get close to the religious enthusiast who has 
been pulled from some deep sense of a burning 
hell, he would confess, I am sure, that the degrada- 
tion of his former life had robbed him of essential 
elements of goodness which not even his newly 
tasted rapture of gospel love could bring back to him. 
His is a saved life, a life in which repentance has 
brought him a strange sense of peace. But there are 
some things repentance will not give him, though he 
seek them " carefully with tears." Repentance can 
never bring back to him the freshness of a soul that 
knows nothing of evil imaginings; it can never 
erase from his memory the foul stains of those hours 
when his soul lay besmirched in vulgar indulgence; 
it can never take out of the past those associations 
of which it were a shame to speak; repentance can 
never give him back the calm strength and poise of 
assured moral mastery. Deep in his heart the victim 
knows that he must always walk the edge of a preci- 
pice over which some sudden gust of temptation 

165 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

may hurl him. The effects of the old life will go 
with him to the grave. If vice left some mark of 
disease upon him, no amount of prayer will cause 
it to disappear. If he betrayed some friend, of 
what avail that he should call to God in bitter re- 
gret? In the lost years he started influences that 
will go on to the end of time; for all that we 
know, throughout eternity. God has saved him, 
but God can never save him from the burning re- 
morse of his life's follies. To preach any other 
gospel than this would be to play fast and loose 
with the moral laws of the universe. 

The Divinity of Man 

In the great deep of man's hidden self are the 
true and abiding things that cannot be destroyed. 
They separate him from the brute creation; 
they bespeak the divinity of his nature. Consider, 
if you will, those foundations of heart and mind 
and soul that cannot be broken up. What of that 
divine quality of mercy, that overflowing pity 
which of itself makes impossible the belief that man 
is a creature of the ground ? What of the love that 
sacrifices, and the faith that sees beyond mortal 
vision, and the hope that steadies us in the darkness 

1 66 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

and storm while we wait for the morning? What 
of the courage that dares impossible tasks, and the 
patriotism that would be sheer folly were man but 
a creature of to-day? What of the craving for 
knowledge, the passion to realize the truth, what 
is the meaning of this if man goes back to the 
earth and is as naught? What of the whisperings 
of conscience, and the admonitions of the will? 
What of man's stern allegiance to duty? What of 
those hours of worship, when he bows reverently as 
in the presence of a Being from whom he came and 
unto whom his soul takes its way? What of good- 
ness, that indefinable word which sums up all that 
is highest and best in a human life? What of all 
these spiritual qualities? What do they mean? 
What blindness for men to say that modern knowl- 
edge has swept away the articles of faith, when 
deep down in their very nature are laid foundations 
for faith that cannot be removed, when the moral 
and spiritual intuitions of their being yield the stuff 
out of which the highest and noblest faith may be 
created! The religious upheaval which began more 
than half a century ago is now past and the indefin- 
able and mysterious creature man still remains; not 
the man of the ground, but the man of the over- 

167 



SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS 

arching heavens, the man of heart and conscience, 
the man of intellect and will, the man to whom has 
been given the power of setting his life in those 
currents of living spirit that flow on and out into 
the fathomless sea of eternity. 



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